The second was “Has a Frog a Soul? and if so, of what Nature is that Soul?” (1870), a physiological discussion as to the seat of those purposive actions of which the animal is capable after it has lost ordinary volition and consciousness by the removal of the front part of its brain.  Are these things attributes of the soul, and are they resident not even in the brain, but in the spinal marrow?  If metaphysics starts from psychology, psychology itself depends greatly upon physiology; current theories need reconsideration.  This paper was the starting-point for his larger essay on “Animals as Automata,” delivered as an address before the British Association in 1874.

The third paper (1876) was on “The Evidence of the Miracle of the Resurrection,” as to which he, so to say, moved the previous question, arguing that there was no valid evidence of actual death having taken place.  The paper was the result of an invitation on the part of some of his metaphysical opponents.  As he rejected the miraculous, they asked him to write on a definite miracle, and explain his reasons for not accepting it.  He chose this subject because, in the first place, it was a cardinal instance; and, in the second, that as it was a miracle not worked by Christ himself, a discussion of its genuineness could not possibly suggest personal fraud and so inflict gratuitous pain upon believers in it.  The question of the fundamentals of Christian evidences had long been in his mind; it was no new subject to him when in the eighties, debarred by his health from physiological researches, he extended his work on Biblical studies.

If the Metaphysical Society effected nothing else, it brought about a personal rapprochement between the representatives of opposing schools of thought.  It became clear to the older school that the new thinkers had by no means failed, as they suspected, to examine the older doctrines.  Theirs was not dishonest doubt, but a strong demand for better evidence.  If the Society itself “died of too much love,” it may well have contributed to the greater amenity of public discussion as the years passed, and the diminution of the former rabid denunciations which waned as the new doctrines spread, and were even absorbed and digested by their former antagonists.

VII

CONTROVERSY AND THE BATTLE OF THE “ORIGIN”

The piercing clearness of mind described by Prof.  Sidgwick, which could not express itself otherwise than trenchantly and drove straight at the heart of the subject, gave Huxley the popular reputation of being above all things a controversialist.  Naturally enough, the public knew little and cared less for the unspectacular researches among the Invertebrates, which had won such high scientific fame.  They were only stirred when the results of study in geology, in fossil forms and simian anatomy, clashed with long-established popular conceptions.  There was also a gladiatorial delight in watching controversy not simply abstract, but fanned by personal conviction, which marked the champions above all as good fighters.