VI

VERACITY AND AGNOSTICISM

One of the most ticklish of all subjects to handle at this period was the position of the human species in zoological classification.  “It was a burning question in the sense that those who touched it were almost certain to burn their fingers severely.”  In the fifties Sir William Lawrence had been well-nigh ostracized for his book On Man, “which now might be read in a Sunday-school without surprising anybody.”  When Huxley submitted the proofs of Man’s Place in Nature to “a competent anatomist, and good friend of his,” asking him, if he could, to point out any errors of fact, the friend—­it was Lawrence himself—­declared he could find none, but gave an earnest warning as to the consequences of publication.  Here was one of the cases where Huxley’s firm resolution applied—­to speak out if necessary, regardless of consequences; indeed, he felt sure that all the evil things prophesied would not be so painful to him as the giving up that which he had resolved to do upon grounds which he conceived to be right.  As he wrote later (in 1876):—­

It seemed to me that a man of science has no raison d’etre at all unless he is willing to face much greater risks than these for the sake of that which he believes to be true; and further, that to a man of science such risks do not count for much—­they are by no means so serious as they are to a man of letters, for example.

The book was published, and the friend’s forecast was amply justified.

The Boreas of criticism blew his hardest blasts of misrepresentation and ridicule for some years, and I was even as one of the wicked.  Indeed, it surprises me at times to think how any one who had sunk so low could since have emerged into, at any rate, relative respectability.  Personally, like the non-corvine personages in the Ingoldsby legend, I did not feel “one penny the worse.”  Translated into several languages, the book reached a wider public than I had ever hoped for; being largely helped, I imagine, by the Ernulphine advertisements to which I referred.  It has had the honour of being freely utilized without acknowledgment by writers of repute; and, finally, it achieved the fate, which is the euthanasia of a scientific work, of being enclosed among the rubble of the foundations of later knowledge, and forgotten.

To my observation, human nature has not sensibly changed during the last thirty years.  I doubt not that there are truths as plainly obvious, and as generally denied, as those contained in Man’s Place in Nature, now awaiting enunciation.  If there is a young man of the present generation who has taken as much trouble as I did to assure himself that they are truths, let him come out with them, without troubling his head about the barking of the dogs of St. Ernulphus. Veritas praevalebit—­some day; and even if she