This was the secret of his lucidity.  In no one could Buffon’s aphorism on style find a better illustration, “Le style c’est l’homme meme.”  In him science and literature, too often divorced, were closely united; and literature owes him a debt for importing into it so much of the highest scientific habit of mind; for showing that truthfulness need not be bald, and that real power lies more in exact accuracy than in luxuriance of diction.  Years after, no less an authority than Spedding, in a letter upon the influence of Bacon on his own style in the matter of exactitude, the pruning of fine epithets and sweeping statements, the reduction of numberless superlatives to positives, asserted that, if as a young man he had fallen in with Huxley’s writings before Bacon’s, they would have produced the same effect upon him.

Of the other two discourses referred to, one is the opening address which he delivered as Principal at the South London Working Men’s College on January 4, “A Liberal Education, and Where to Find It.”  This is not a brief for science to the exclusion of other teaching; no essay has insisted more strenuously on the evils of a one-sided education, whether it be classical or scientific; but it urged the necessity for a strong tincture of science and her method, if the modern conception of the world, created by the spread of natural knowledge, is to be fairly understood.  If culture is the “criticism of life,” it is fallacious if deprived of knowledge of the most important factor which has transformed the medieval into the modern spirit.

Two of his most striking passages are to be found in this address; one the simile of the force behind nature as the hidden chess player; the other the noble description of the end of a true education.

Well known as it is, I venture to quote the latter as an instance of his style:—­]

That man, I think, has had a liberal education, who has been so trained in youth that his body is the ready servant of his will, and does with ease and pleasure all the work that as a mechanism it is capable of; whose intellect is a clear cold logic engine, with all its parts of equal strength, and in smooth working order; ready, like a steam engine, to be turned to any kind of work, and spin the gossamers as well as forge the anchors of the mind; whose mind is stored with a knowledge of the great and fundamental truths of nature and of the laws of her operations; one who, no stunted ascetic, is full of life and fire, but whose passions are trained to come to heel by a vigorous will, the servant of a tender conscience; who has learned to love all beauty, whether of nature or of art, to hate all vileness, and to respect others as himself.

Such an one and no other, I conceive, has had a liberal education, for he is, as completely as a man can be, in harmony with nature.  He will make the best of her, and she of him.  They will get on together rarely; she as his ever-beneficent mother; he as her mouth-piece, her conscious self, her minister and interpreter.