Why may not soul and matter be of the same substance (i.e., basis whereon to fix qualities; for we cannot suppose a quality to exist per se, it must have a something to qualify), but with different qualities?

Hamilton’s analysis of the Absolute, once learned, was never forgotten.  It was a philosophic touchstone, understood by the boy, applied by the man.  With the Absolute, an entity stripped of perceptible qualities, an “hypostatized negation,” he could have no traffic.  The Cartesian motto of thought as the essence of existence became another fixed point for him, and his last questioning phrase half suggests the line of reasoning which, as he afterwards put it, asserts that, philosophically speaking, materialism is but spiritualism turned inside out.

III

MEDICAL TRAINING

At fifteen and a-half he began his medical training.  Engineering, it seems, was not within his parents’ purview; the boy was thoughtful and scientific; medicine was then the only avenue for science, and medicine loomed large on their horizon, for two of their daughters had married doctors.  Of these, Dr. Cooke had already begun to give him instruction in anatomy; it looked as though destiny had marked out his career.

In those days, the future doctor began by being apprenticed to a regular practitioner; he picked up a great deal from compounding medicines, watching out-patients in the surgery, and attending simple cases, especially if he had a capable man to work under.  At the same time he prepared for his future examinations, and got ready to walk the hospitals.

This apprenticeship was a strongly formative period in Huxley’s life.  He was bound to Dr. Chandler, of Rotherhithe, and joined him in this quarter of poverty and struggle on January 7, 1841.  The little journal shows him busy with all the subjects of the London Matriculation:  History ancient and modern, Greek, Latin, English Grammar, Chemistry, Mathematics, Physics, with German also and Physiology, besides experimental work in natural science, philosophical analysis, and a copious course of Carlyle.

But this book-work was the least of the influences acting upon him.  Dr. Chandler had charge of the parish doctoring, and the boy’s experiences among the poor in the dock region of the East End left an ineffaceable mark.  It was a grim, living commentary on his Carlyle.  For the rest of his life the cause of the poor appealed vividly to him, because he had at least seen something of the way in which the poor lived.  People who were suffering from nothing but slow starvation would come to him for medical aid.  One scene above all was burnt into his memory:  a sick girl in a wretched garret, the boy visitor saying as gently as he could that her sole need was better food, and the sister of the starved child who turned upon him with a kind of choking passion, and, pulling from her pocket a few pence and half-pence and holding them out, cried:  “That is all I get for six-and-thirty hours’ work, and you talk about giving her proper food.”