cience and metaphysics.
French and German, the two foreign languages which are a necessary
part of the mental equipment of an English-speaking man of science,
were familiar to him. Finally, he had of necessity the wide and varied
vocabulary of the natural and technical sciences at his disposal. From
these varied sources, Huxley had a fund of words, a store of the raw
material for expressing ideas, very much greater and more varied than
that in the possession of most writers. You will find in his writings
abundant and omnipresent evidence of the enormous wealth of verbal
material ready for the ideas he wished to set forth: a Greek phrase, a
German phrase, a Latin or French phrase, or a group of words borrowed
from one of our own great writers always seemed to await his wish.
General Booth's scheme for elevating the masses by cymbals and dogma
was "corybantic Christianity"; to explain what he thought was the
Catholic attitude to the doctrine of evolution, he said it would have
been called _damnabilis_ by Father Suarez, and that he would have
meant "not that it was to be damned, but that it was an active
principle capable of damning." Huxley was like a builder who did not
limit himself while he was constructing a house to the ordinary
materials from the most convenient local quarry, but who collected
endlessly from all the quarries and brickfields of the world, and
brought to his heaps curiously wrought stones taken from a thousand
old buildings. The swift choice from such a varied material gave an
ease and appearance of natural growth to his work; it produced many
surprising and delightful combinations, and it never sacrificed
convenience of expression to exigencies of the materials for
expression. On the other hand, Huxley lacked the sedulous concern for
words themselves as things valuable and delightful; the delight of the
craftsman in his tools; the dainty and respectful tribute paid to the
words themselves; in fine, he took little pleasure in words themselves
and used them as counters rather than as coins. Careful reflection and
examination will make it plain that the pleasure to be got from
Huxley's style is not due in any large measure to his choice and
handling of words. There is no evidence that he deliberately and
fastidiously preferred one word to another, that he took delight in
the savour of individual words, in the placing of plain words in a
context to make them sparkle, in the avoidance of some, in the
deli