He was a dedicated reader as a teenager, consuming not only textbooks, but works by subversives such as David Hume and Thomas Carlyle. T. H. Huxley. Aged 20. . Sketch by himself. To Henrietta Heathorn, he described the state of doubt as a disease from which he suffered.
Skepticism is a divine endowment.
The lectures and papers of the 1850s constantly had as their basis his sense of skepticism tuned up with prophetic fervor, which attained a climax at Huxley's engagement with Bishop Wilberforce at Oxford in the spring of 1860, when Huxley claimed he would not be embarrassed by having an ape as an ancestor, however blasphemous that proposition. In the fall of 1860, his son Noel died of scarlet fever. Among the consolation letters he received was one from the vicar, social reformer, poet, novelist, and professor of history Charles Kingsley, who wondered how a parent could assuage his grief without believing in immortality. In later letters to Kingsley, Huxley added postscripts to his alignment of skepticism with a healthy ethics. He had no objection to the possibility of immortality or miracles.