brain of Herbert Spencer when he was learning to think
for himself.

When the victory had become a rout, there were many others who joined
forces with the evolutionists; but at first the thinkers named above
stood together and received the rather unsavory gibes and jeers of those
who get their episcopopagy and science from the same source.

Darwin was the only man in the group who was a university graduate, and
he once said that he owed nothing to his Alma Mater, save the stimulus
derived from her disapproval.

For the work these men had to do there was no precedent: no one had gone
before and blazed a trail.

Learning, like capital, is timid; but ignorance coupled with a desire to
know, is bold. Do I then make a plea for ignorance? Yes, most assuredly.
It is just as well not to know so much, as to be a theologian and know
so many things that are not true.

Learning and institutions of learning subdue men into conformity; only
the man who belongs to nothing is free; and ignorance, as well as a
certain indifference to what the world has said and done, is a necessary
factor in the character of him who would do a great work. It was the
combined ignorance and boldness of Columbus that made it possible for
him to give the world a continent.

Yet the man who has not had a college training often feels he has
somehow missed something valuable: there is timidity and hesitation when
he is in the presence of those who have had "advantages." And Huxley
felt this loss, more or less, up to his thirty-fifth year, when Fate had
him cross swords with college men, and then the truth became his that if
he had had the regular university training, it was quite probable that
he would have accepted the doctrines the universities taught, and would
then have been in the camp of the "enemy," instead of with what he
called the "blessed minority."

Isolation is a great aid to the thinker. Some of the best books the
world has ever known were written behind prison-bars; exile has done
much for literature, and a protracted sea-voyage has allowed many a good
man to roam the universe in imagination. Some of Macaulay's best essays
were written on board slow-going sailing-ships that were blown by
vagrant winds from England to India. Darwin, Hooker and Huxley, all got
their scientific baptism on board of surveying-ships, where time was
plentiful and anything but fleeting, and most everything else was
scarce.

Huxley was only assistant surgeon on