be aimed at, I was almost going to say, the most important end of
all social arrangements, is to keep these glorious sports of
Nature from being either corrupted by luxury or starved by
poverty, and to put them into the position in which they can do
the work for which they are specially fitted.... I weigh my words
when I say that if the nation could purchase a potential Watt or
Davy or Faraday, at the cost of a hundred thousand pounds down,
he would be dirt cheap at the money."

The beginning and end of the whole matter was that a national system
of education was above all things a "capacity-catcher," designed to
secure against the loss of the incalculable advantages to be gained by
cultivating the best genius born in the land.

CHAPTER XII

CITIZEN, ORATOR, AND ESSAYIST

Huxley's Activity in Public Affairs--Official in Scientific
Societies--Royal Commissions--Vivisection--Characteristics of his
Public Speaking--His Method of Exposition--His
Essays--Vocabulary--Phrase-Making--His Style Essentially one of
Ideas.

A great body of fine work in science and literature has been produced
by persons who may be described as typically academic. Such persons
confine their interest in life within the boundaries of their own
immediate pursuits; they are absorbed so completely by their
avocations that the hurly-burly of the world seems needlessly
distracting and a little vulgar. No doubt the thoughts of those who
cry out most loudly against disturbance by the intruding claims of the
world are, for the most part, hardly worth disturbing; the attitude to
extrinsic things of those who are absorbed by their work is aped not
infrequently by those who are absorbed only in themselves. None the
less it is important to recognise that a genuine aversion from affairs
is characteristic of many fine original investigators, and it is on
such persons that the idea of the simple and childlike nature of
philosophers, a simplicity often reaching real incapacity for the
affairs of life, is based. There was no trace of this natural
isolation in the character of Huxley. He was not only a serious
student of science but a keen and zealous citizen, eagerly conscious
of the great social and political movements around him, with the full
sense that he was a man living in society with other men and that
there was a business of life as well as a business of the laboratory.
We have seen wi