Search -
The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley
The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Author:Leonard Huxley Volume: v. 1 General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1903 Original Publisher: Macmillan Subjects: Biology Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Mill... more »ion-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: First Principles, and two other fragments amounting to thirty-two pages. With characteristic accuracy, moreover, Mr. Spencer tells me that comparison of the proofs of the three latter with the published works shows the precise number of the "brilliant speculations choked in an embryonic state" therein by his "devil's advocacy" (ii. 18) to be four. But the period assigned for this "devil's advocacy," going back "thirty odd years," from 1884 to the beginning of my father's acquaintance with Mr. Spencer, indicates that the playful allusion must be as much to the informal dialectics of conversation as to serious written work, for the reading of proofs referred to above, only began with the Synthetic Philosophy in 1860. L. H. November 1902. PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION My father's life was one of so many interests, and his work was at all times so diversified, that to follow each thread separately, as if he had been engaged on that alone for a time, would be to give a false impression of his activity and the peculiar character of his labours. All through his active career he was equally busy with research into nature, with studies in philosophy, with teaching and administrative work. The real measure of his energy can only be found when all these are considered together. Without this there can be no conception of the limitations imposed upon him in his chosen life's work. The mere amount of his research is greatly magnified by the smallness of the time allowed for it. But great as was the impression left by these researches in purely scientific...« less