I am called away and must close my letter.  Don’t trouble to answer it unless you are so minded.

Ever yours faithfully,

T.H.  Huxley.

Jermyn Street, May 22, 1863.

My dear Kingsley,

Pray excuse my delay in replying to your letter.  I have been very much pressed for time for these two or three days.

First touching the action of the spermatozoon.  The best information you can find on the subject is, I think, in Newport’s papers in the “Philosophical Transactions” for 1851, 1853, and 1854, especially the 1853 paper.  Newport treats only of the Frog, but the information he gives is very full and definite.  Allen Thomson’s very accurate and learned article “Ovum” in Todd’s “Cyclopaedia” is also well worth looking through, though unfortunately it is least full just where you want most information.  In French there is Coste’s “Developpement des Corps organises” and the volume on “Development” by Bischoff in the French translation of the last edition of Soemmering’s “Anatomy.”

So much for your inquiries as to the matters of fact.  Next, as to questions of speculation.  If any expression of ignorance on my part will bring us nearer we are likely to come into absolute contact, for the possibilities of “may be” are, to me, infinite.

I know nothing of Necessity, abominate the word Law (except as meaning that we know nothing to the contrary), and am quite ready to admit that there may be some place, “other side of nowhere,” par exemple, where 2 + 2 = 5, and all bodies naturally repel one another instead of gravitating together.

I don’t know whether Matter is anything distinct from Force.  I don’t know that atoms are anything but pure myths.  Cogito, ergo sum is to my mind a ridiculous piece of bad logic, all I can say at any time being “Cogito.”  The Latin form I hold to be preferable to the English “I think,” because the latter asserts the existence of an Ego—­about which the bundle of phenomena at present addressing you knows nothing.  In fact, if I am pushed, metaphysical speculation lands me exactly where your friend Raphael was when his bitch pupped.  In other words, I believe in Hamilton, Mansell and Herbert Spencer so long as they are destructive, and I laugh at their beards as soon as they try to spin their own cobwebs.

Is this basis of ignorance broad enough for you?  If you, theologian, can find as firm footing as I, man of science, do on this foundation of minus nought—­there will be nought to fear for our ever diverging.

For you see I am quite as ready to admit your doctrine that souls secrete bodies as I am the opposite one that bodies secrete souls—­simply because I deny the possibility of obtaining any evidence as to the truth and falsehood of either hypothesis.  My fundamental axiom of speculative philosophy is that materialism and spiritualism are opposite poles of the same absurdity—­the absurdity of imagining that we know anything about either spirit or matter.