Here seems to me to be the great gulf fixed between science and theology—­beside which all Colenso controversies, reconcilements of Scripture a la Pye Smith, etc., cut a very small figure.

You must have thought over all this long ago; but steeped as I am in scientific thought from morning till night, the contrast has perhaps a greater vividness to me.  I go into society, and except among two or three of my scientific colleagues I find myself alone on these subjects, and as hopelessly at variance with the majority of my fellow-men as they would be with their neighbours if they were set down among the Ashantees.  I don’t like this state of things for myself—­least of all do I see how it will work out for my children.  But as my mind is constituted, there is no way out of it, and I can only envy you if you can see things differently.

Ever yours very faithfully,

T.H.  Huxley.

Jermyn Street, May 5, 1863.

My dear Kingsley,

My wife and children are away at Felixstow on the Suffolk coast, and as I run down on Saturday and come back on Monday your Ms. has been kept longer than it should have been.  I am quite agreed with the general tenor of your argument; and indeed I have often argued against those who maintain the intellectual gulf between man and the lower animals to be an impassable one, by pointing to the immense intellectual chasm as compared to the structural differences between two species of bees or between sheep and goat or dog and wolf.  So again your remarks upon the argument drawn from the apparent absence of progression in animals seem to me to be quite just.  You might strengthen them much by reference to the absence of progression in many races of men.  The West African savage, as the old voyagers show, was in just the same condition two hundred years ago as now—­and I suspect that the modern Patagonian is as nearly as possible the unimproved representative of the makers of the flint implements of Abbeville.

Lyell’s phrase is very good, but it is a simple application of Darwin’s views to human history.  The advance of mankind has everywhere depended on the production of men of genius; and that production is a case of “spontaneous variation” becoming hereditary, not by physical propagation, but by the help of language, letters and the printing press.  Newton was to all intents and purposes a “sport” of a dull agricultural stock, and his intellectual powers are to a certain extent propagated by the grafting of the “Principia,” his brain-shoot, on us.

Many thanks for your letter.  It is a great pleasure to me to be able to speak out to any one who, like yourself, is striving to get at truth through a region of intellectual and moral influences so entirely distinct from those to which I am exposed.

I am not much given to open my heart to anybody, and on looking back I am often astonished at the way in which I threw myself and my troubles at your head, in those bitter days when my poor boy died.  But the way in which you received my heathen letters set up a freemasonry between us, at any rate on my side; and if they make you a bishop I advise you not to let your private secretary open any letters with my name in the corner, for they are as likely as not to contain matters which will make the clerical hair stand on end.