olesome cooling effect on
the blood, particularly in people of a sanguine temperament.

Reflections on making mistakes lead to a striking conclusion:--

The most considerable difference I note among men is not in
their readiness to fall into error, but in their readiness to
acknowledge these inevitable lapses.

Until he reached middle age, his quickness of thought and decision was
fretted by men of slower mind if they happened to be associated with
him on some enterprise, and to certain colleagues his ardour was
sometimes almost terrifying. And in those days also, before custom had
hardened him, he was apt to be short with those devoid of any claim
to intervene who thrust themselves into his affairs. Salutary as this
doubtless was to the really ignorant meddler, there was one occasion,
of which I learnt thirty years later, where at bottom the rebuke was
not deserved. The sufferer, admittedly devoid of anatomical knowledge,
questioned the statement in an early edition of _The Elementary
Physiology_ as to the method in which the voice is produced, and
propounded a different movement in part of the larynx. The Professor
replied to the effect that the writer had better learn some anatomy
before challenging the result of careful experiment. But some years
later, as a result of further investigation, this same change was made
in a new edition of the book. By that time the very name of the critic
was forgotten. But if he and his suggestion had been remembered, I am
inclined to think that he would have received an _amende_.

XII

SCIENCE AND ETHICS

Huxley's work in education was his direct contribution to the social
improvement of the world. Not instruction merely--for, "though
under-instruction is a bad thing, it is not impossible that
over-instruction may be a worse"--but through education, the bringing
out of the moral worth and intellectual clearness of the individual
citizen, which is the one condition of the success of a State. And
this condition, resting on the basic faith in veracity, he felt to be
above all the work of science, the Cinderella of thought. For, as he
wrote:--

If the diseases of Society consist in the weakness of its
faith in the existence of the God of the theologians, in a
future state, and in uncaused volitions, the indication, as
the doctors say, is to suppress Theology and Philosophy, whose
bickerings about things of which they know nothing have