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 been the prime cause and continual sustenance of that evil scepticism which is the Nemesis of meddling with the unknowable.

Cinderella is modestly conscious of her ignorance of these high matters.  She lights the fire, sweeps the house, and provides the dinner; and is rewarded by being told that she is a base creature, devoted to low and material interests.  But in her garret she has fairy visions out of the ken of the pair of shrews who are quarrelling downstairs.  She sees the order which pervades the seeming disorder of the world; the great drama of evolution, with its full share