Aphorisms and Reflections from the Works of T. H. Huxley Part 5

Writing is a form of drawing; therefore if you five the same attention and trouble to drawing as you do to writing, depend upon it, there is n.o.body who cannot be made to draw, more or less well.... I do not say for one moment you would make an artistic draughtsman. Artists are not made; they grow..... You can teach simple drawing, and you will find it an implement of learning of extreme value. I do not think its value can be exaggerated, because it gives you the means of training the young in attention and accuracy, which are the two things in which all mankind are more deficient than in any other mental quality whatever.

XCV

If a man cannot get literary culture of the highest kind out of his Bible, and Chaucer, and Shakespeare, and Milton, and Hobbes, and Bishop Berkeley, to mention only a few of our ill.u.s.trious writers--I say, if he cannot get it out of those writers, he cannot get it out of anything; and I would a.s.suredly devote a very large portion of the time of every English child to the careful study of the models of English writing of such varied and wonderful kind as we possess, and, what is still more important and still more neglected, the habit of using that language with precision, with force, and with art.

XCVI

I fancy we are almost the only nation in the world who seem to think that composition comes by nature. The French attend to their own language, the Germans study theirs; but Englishmen do not seem to think it is worth their while.

XCVII

Many of the faults and mistakes of the ancient philosophers are traceable to the fact that they knew no language but their own, and were often led into confusing the symbol with the thought which it embodied.

XCVIII

If the time given to education permits, add Latin and German. Latin, because it is the key to nearly one-half of English and to all the Romance languages; and German, because it is the key to almost all the remainder of English, and helps you to understand a race from whom most of us have sprung, and who have a character and a literature of a fateful force in the history of the world, such as probably has been allotted to those of no other people, except the Jews, the Greeks, and ourselves.

XCIX

In an ideal University,.... the force of living example should fire the student with a n.o.ble ambition to emulate the learning of learned men, and to follow in the footsteps of the explorers of new fields of knowledge. And the very air he breathes should be charged with that enthusiasm for truth, that fanaticism of veracity, which is a greater possession than much learning; a n.o.bler gift than the power of increasing knowledge; by go much greater and n.o.bler than these, as the moral nature of man is greater than the intellectual; for veracity is the heart of morality. Do what you can to do what you ought, and leave hoping and fearing alone.

CI

On the face of the matter, it is absurd to ask whether it is more important to know the limits of one's powers; or the ends for which they ought to be exerted; or the conditions under which they must be exerted.

One may as well inquire which of the terms of a Rule of Three sum one ought to know in order to get a trustworthy result. Practical life is such a sum, in which your duty multiplied into your capacity, and divided by your circ.u.mstances, gives you the fourth term in the proportion, which is your deserts, with great accuracy.

CII

Books are the money of Literature, but only the counters of Science.

CIII

Medicine was the foster-mother of Chemistry, because it has to do with the preparation of drugs and the detection of poisons; of Botany, because it enabled the physician to recognise medicinal herbs; of Comparative Anatomy and Physiology, because the man who studied Human Anatomy and Physiology for purely medical purposes was led to extend his studies to the rest of the animal world.

CIV

A thorough study of Human Physiology is, in itself, an education broader and more comprehensive than much that pa.s.ses under that name. There is no side of the intellect which it does not call into play, no region of human knowledge into which either its roots, or its branches, do not extend; like the Atlantic between the Old and the New Worlds, its waves wash the sh.o.r.es of the two worlds of matter and of mind; its tributary streams flow from both; through its waters, as yet unfurrowed by the keel of any Columbus, lies the road, if such there be, from the one to the other; far away from that North-west Pa.s.sage of mere speculation, in which so many brave souls have been hopelessly frozen up.

CV

You know that among the Bees, it depends on the kind of cell in which the egg is deposited, and the quant.i.ty and quality of food which is supplied to the grub, whether it shall turn out a busy little worker or a big idle queen. And, in the human hive, the cells of the endowed larvae are always tending to enlarge, and their food to improve, until we get queens, beautiful to behold, but which gather no honey and build no comb.

CVI

Examination, like fire, is a good servant, but a bad master; and there seems to me to be some danger of its becoming our master. I by no means stand alone in this opinion. Experienced friends of mine do not hesitate to say that students whose career they watch appear to them to become deteriorated by the constant effort to pa.s.s this or that examination, just as we hear of mens brains becoming affected by the daily necessity of catching a train. They work to pa.s.s, not to know; and outraged Science takes Her revenge. They do pa.s.s, and they don't know.

CVII

A man's worst difficulties begin when he is able to do as he likes.

CVIII

There is but one right, and the possibilities of wrong are infinite.

CIX

It is given to few to add to the store of knowledge, to strike new springs of thought, or to shape new forms of beauty. But so sure as it is that men live not by bread, but by ideas, so sure is it that the future of the world lies in the hands of those who are able to carry the interpretation of nature a step further than their predecessors.

CX

Size is not grandeur, and territory does not make a nation.

CXI

Whatever practical people may say, this world is, after all, absolutely governed by ideas, and very often by the wildest and most hypothetical ideas. It is a matter of the very greatest importance that our theories of things, and even of things that seem a long way apart from our daily lives, should be as far as possible true, and as far as possible removed from error.

CXII

All truth, in the long run, is only common sense clarified.

CXIII

You may read any quant.i.ty of books, and you may be almost as ignorant as you were at starting, if you don't have, at the back of your minds, the change for words in definite images which can only be acquired through the operation of your observing faculties on the phenomena of nature.

CXIV

The saying that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing is to my mind, a very dangerous adage. If knowledge is real and genuine, I do not believe that it is other than a very valuable possession, however infinitesimal its quant.i.ty may be. Indeed, if a little knowledge is dangerous, where is the man who has so much as to be out of danger?