Owen was an accomplished lecturer; but one’s attention to him depended on two things—a primary interest in the subject, and some elementary acquaintance with it. If, for example, his subject were the comparative anatomy of the cycloid and ganoid fishes, the difference in their scales was scarcely of vital importance to one’s general culture. But if he were lecturing on fish, he would stick to fish; it would be essentially a _jour maigre_.
With Huxley, the suggestion was worth more than the thing said. One thought of it afterwards, and wondered whether his words implied all they seemed to imply. One knew that the scientist was also a philosopher; and one longed to get at him, at the man himself, and listen to the lessons which his work had taught him. At one of these lectures I had the honour of being introduced to him by a great friend of mine, John Marshall, then President of the College of Surgeons. In later years I used to meet him constantly at the Athenæum.
Looking back to the days of one’s plasticity, two men are pre-eminent among my Dii Majores. To John Stuart Mill and to Thomas Huxley I owe more, educationally, than to any other teachers. Mill’s logic was simply a revelation to me. For what Kant calls ‘discipline,’ I still know no book, unless it be the ‘Critique’ itself, equal to it. But perhaps it is the men themselves, their earnestness, their splendid courage, their noble simplicity, that most inspired one with reverence. It was Huxley’s aim to enlighten the many, and he enlightened them. It was Mill’s lot to help thinkers, and he helped them. _Sapere aude_ was the motto of both. How few there are who dare to adopt it! To love truth is valiantly professed by all; but to pursue it at all costs, to ‘dare to be wise’ needs daring of the highest order.
Mill had the enormous advantage, to start with, of an education unbiassed by any theological creed; and he brought exceptional powers of abstract reasoning to bear upon matters of permanent and supreme importance to all men. Yet, in spite of his ruthless impartiality, I should not hesitate to call him a religious man. This very tendency which no imaginative mind, no man or woman with any strain of poetical feeling, can be without, invests Mill’s character with a clash of humanity which entitles him to a place in our affections. It is in this respect that he so widely differs from Mr. Herbert Spencer. Courageous Mr. Spencer was, but his courage seems to have been due almost as much to absence of sympathy or kinship with his fellow-creatures, and to his contempt of their opinions, as from his dispassionate love of truth, or his sometimes passionate defence of his own tenets.