Page:A biographical dictionary of modern rationalists.djvu/223

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HUXLEY
HYSLOP

anatomical work from 1850 to 1860 gave him a high position in science, and at the appearance of Darwin's Origin of Species in 1859 his powerful and fearless advocacy beat down its opponents. He routed Sir R. Owen, who urged imaginary differences between man and the apes, and by a series of essays and addresses, of great lucidity and charm of style, he imposed the truth upon England. In 1863 his Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature made the first serious application of evolution to man. At the same time he enriched science by his hundreds of able memoirs, sat on many Royal Commissions, and was Hunterian Professor at the Royal College of Surgeons (1863-69) and Fullerian Professor at the Royal Institution (1863-67). In 1870 he was elected to the London School Board, in 1871 he became secretary to the Royal Society, in 1888 he received the Copley Medal, and in 1894 the Darwin Medal. He had also the Wollaston medal, and was an honorary member of forty-three foreign societies. In 1890 he retired from his splendid and successful work and went to live at Eastbourne. He was made Privy Councillor in 1892. Following Hume's metaphysic, Huxley held that we know nothing of "the nature of either matter or spirit," so he condemned both Materialism and Theism, and defined his position as "Agnostic." He had begun early to doubt the creeds, and his well-known letter to Kingsley in 1860 (Life, i, 217-22), at the death of his son, shows that he had by that time discarded all religious ideas. There is a legend still current in clerical literature that he in later life told a Christian friend that he "wished he could believe." The letters of his last three years show that this is ludicrous. He writes to Romanes in 1892: "I have a great respect for the Nazarenism of Jesus very little for later Christianity" (ii, 339). Five months before he died he had a conversation on religion with his son, and was cheerfully contemptuous of Christianity. "The most remarkable achievement of the Jew," he said, "was to impose on Europe for eighteen centuries his own superstitions" (ii, 427). The three lines carved on his tombstone were put there only because they were composed by Mrs. Huxley, who was a Theist. They are Agnostic as to a future life. See Life and Letters of T. H. Huxley (2 vols., 1900), by Leonard Huxley. D. June 29, 1895.

Hyndman, Henry Mayers, B.A., Socialist leader. B. Mar. 7, 1842. Ed. privately and Cambridge (Trinity College). He was war correspondent of the Pall Mall Gazette in 1866, and he continued at journalism for some years. A friend of Mazzini, Garibaldi, and other stragglers against oppression, he adopted Socialist views, founded the Social Democratic Federation (1881), and took an active part in the creation of the International. He was a member of the International Socialist Bureau 1900-1910, and there are few reforms that have not had his spirited assistance. In his Future of Democracy (1915) he remarks that "the hope of another world, with its sempiternal happiness for disembodied spirits," is "a popular delusion" (p. 34); and his frank Agnosticism appears in his Record of an Adventurous Life (1911), Further Reminiscences (1912), and Clemenceau (1919).

Hyslop, Professor James Hervey, Ph.D., LL.D., psychologist. B. Aug. 18, 1854. Ed. Leipzig and John Hopkins Universities. He was instructor in philosophy at Lake Forest 1880-82 and 1884-85, at Smith College 1885-86, and at Bucknell University 1888-89; tutor of philosophy, ethics, and psychology 1889-91, instructor in ethics 1891-95, and professor of logic and ethics at Columbia University 1895-1902. Since 1903 he has been secretary of the American Institute for Scientific Research, and he is editor of the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research. Professor Hyslop thinks that the psychic evidence is in favour of survival, but he stands apart entirely from the creeds (Science and a Future Life, 1905,

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