done.  The great end of life is not knowledge but action.  What men need is as much knowledge as they can assimilate and organise into a basis for action; give them more and it may become injurious.  One knows people who are as heavy and stupid from undigested learning as others are from over-fulness of meat and drink.  But a small percentage of the population is born with that most excellent quality, a desire for excellence, or with special aptitude of some sort or another....  Now, the most important object of all educational schemes is to catch these exceptional people, and turn them to account for the good of society.  No man can say where they will crop up; like their opposites, the fools and the knaves, they appear sometimes in the palace, and sometimes in the hovel; but the great thing to 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