at the rate is so small
is very fallacious. It is as much a sacrifice of principle to
do a little wrong as to do a great one.

His friend, George Anderson May, with whom the boy of fifteen has "a
long argument on the nature of the soul and the difference between
it and matter," was then a man of six and twenty, in business at
Hinckley.

I maintained that it could not be proved that matter is
_essentially_, as to its base, different from soul. Mr. M.
wittily said soul was the perspiration of matter.

We cannot find the absolute basis of matter; we only know it
by its properties; neither know we the soul in any other way.
_Cogito ergo sum_ is the only thing that we _certainly_ know.

Why may not soul and matter be of the same substance (i.e.,
basis whereon to fix qualities; for we cannot suppose a
quality to exist _per se_, it must have a something to
qualify), but with different qualities?

Hamilton's analysis of the Absolute, once learned, was never
forgotten. It was a philosophic touchstone, understood by the
boy, applied by the man. With the Absolute, an entity stripped of
perceptible qualities, an "hypostatized negation," he could have no
traffic. The Cartesian motto of thought as the essence of existence
became another fixed point for him, and his last questioning phrase
half suggests the line of reasoning which, as he afterwards put
it, asserts that, philosophically speaking, materialism is but
spiritualism turned inside out.

III

MEDICAL TRAINING

At fifteen and a-half he began his medical training. Engineering, it
seems, was not within his parents' purview; the boy was thoughtful
and scientific; medicine was then the only avenue for science, and
medicine loomed large on their horizon, for two of their daughters
had married doctors. Of these, Dr. Cooke had already begun to give him
instruction in anatomy; it looked as though destiny had marked out his
career.

In those days, the future doctor began by being apprenticed to a
regular practitioner; he picked up a great deal from compounding
medicines, watching out-patients in the surgery, and attending simple
cases, especially if he had a capable man to work under. At the same
time he prepared for his future examinations, and got ready to walk
the hospitals.

This apprenticeship was a strongly formative period in Huxley's life.
He was bound to Dr. Chandler, of Rotherhithe, and joined him in this