Ever yours faithfully,

T.H.  Huxley.

Jermyn Street, March 17, 1869.

My dear Darwin,

After I had sent my letter to you the other day I thought how stupid I had been not to put in a slip of paper to say it was meant for —­’s edification.

I made sure you would understand that I wished it to be sent on, and wrote it (standing on the points of my toes and with my tail up very stiff) with that end in view.

[Sketch of two dogs bristling up.]

I am getting so weary of people writing to propose controversy to me upon one point or another, that I begin to wish the article had never been written.  The fighting in itself is not particularly objectionable, but it’s the waste of time.

I begin to understand your sufferings over the “Origin.”  A good book is comparable to a piece of meat, and fools are as flies who swarm to it, each for the purpose of depositing and hatching his own particular maggot of an idea.

Ever yours,

T.H.  Huxley.

[A little later he wrote to Charles Kingsley, who had supported him in the controversy:—­]

Jermyn Street, April 12, 1869.

My dear Kingsley,

Thanks for your hearty bottle-holding.

Congreve is no better than a donkey to take the line he does.  I studied Comte, “Philosophie,” “Politique,” and all sixteen years ago, and having formed my judgment about him, put it into one of the pigeon holes of my brain (about the H[ippocampus] minor [see above.]), and there let it rest till it was wanted.

You are perfectly right in saying that Comte knew nothing about physical science—­it is one of the points I am going to put in evidence.

The law of the three states is mainly evolved from his own consciousness, and is only a bad way of expressing that tendency to personification which is inherent in man.

The Classification of Sciences is bosh—­as Spencer has already shown.

Nothing short of madness, however, can have dictated Congreve’s challenge of my admiration of Comte as a man at the end of his article.  Did you ever read Littre’s “Life of Comte?” I bought it when it came out a year or more ago, and I rose from its perusal with a feeling of sheer disgust and contempt for the man who could treat a noble-hearted woman who had saved his life and his reason, as Comte treated his wife.

As soon as I have time I will deal with Comte effectually, you may depend upon that.  At the same time, I shall endeavour to be just to what there is (as I hold), really great and good in his clear conception of the necessity of reconstructing society from the bottom to the top “sans dieu ni roi,” if I may interpret that somewhat tall phrase as meaning “with our conceptions of religion and politics on a scientific basis.”

Comte in his later days was an apostate from his own creed; his “nouveau grand Etre supreme,” being as big a fetish as ever nigger first made and then worshipped.