These show what an omnivorous reader he was; how well equipped in classics, theology, and general literature, in addition to subjects distinctly his own. He sympathized with every branch of culture. As contrasted with physical science, he said, “Nothing would grieve me more than to see literary training other than a very prominent branch of education.” One corner of his library was filled with a strange company of antiquated books of orthodox type; this he called “the condemned cell.” When looking at the “strange bedfellows” that slept on the shelves, the writer asked Huxley what author had most influenced a style whose clearness and vigour, nevertheless, seems unborrowed; and he at once named the masculine and pellucid Leviathan of Hobbes. He had the happy faculty of rapidly assimilating what he read; of clearly grasping an opponent’s standpoint; and what is a man’s salvation nowadays, freedom from that curse of specialism which kills all sense of proportion, and reduces its slave to the level of the machine-hand that spends his life in making the heads of screws. He believed in “scepticism as the highest duty, and in blind faith as the one unpardonable sin.” “And,” he adds, “it cannot be otherwise, for every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority, the cherishing of the keenest scepticism, the annihilation of the spirit of blind faith; and the most ardent votary of science holds his firmest convictions, not because the men he most venerates holds them; not because their verity is testified by portents and wonders; but because his experience teaches him that whenever he chooses to bring these convictions into contact with their primary source, Nature—whenever he thinks fit to test them by appealing to experiment and to observation—Nature will confirm them. The man of science has learned to believe in justification, not by faith, but by verification.” Therefore he nursed no illusions; would not say that he knew when he did not or could not know, and bidding us follow the evidence whithersoever it leads us, remains the surest-footed guide of our time. Such leadership is his, since he has gone on “from strength to strength.” The changes in the attitude of man toward momentous questions which new evidence and the zeit-geist have effected, have been approaches to the position taken by Huxley since he first caught the public ear. His deep religious feeling kept him in sympathetic touch with his fellows. Ever present to him was “that consciousness of the limitation of man, that sense of an open secret which he cannot penetrate, in which lies the essence of all religion.” In one of his replies to a prominent exponent of the Comtian philosophy, that “incongruous mixture of bad science with eviscerated papistry,” as he calls it, Huxley protests against the idea that the teaching of science is wholly negative.

I venture, he says, to count it an improbable suggestion that any one who has graduated in all the faculties of human relationships; who has taken his share in all the deep joys and deeper anxieties which cling about them, who has felt the burden of young lives entrusted to his care, and has stood alone with his dead before the abyss of the Eternal—has never had a thought beyond negative criticism.

That is the Agnostic position as he defined it; an attitude, not a creed; and if he refused to affirm, he equally refused to deny.

Thus have the Pioneers of Evolution, clear-sighted and sure-footed, led us by ways undreamed-of at the start to a goal undreamed-of by the earliest among them. To have halted on the route when the graver difficulties of the road began would have made the journey futile, and have left their followers in the wilds. Evolution, applied to everything up to man, but stopping at the stage when he appears, would have remained a fascinating study, but would not have become a guiding philosophy of life. It is in the extension of its processes as explanation of all that appertains to mankind that its abiding value consists. That extension was inevitable. The old theologies of civilized races, useful in their day, because answering, however imperfectly, to permanent needs of human nature, no longer suffice. Their dogmas are traced as the lineal descendants of barbaric conceptions; their ritual is becoming an archæological curiosity. They have no answer to the questions propounded by the growing intelligence of our time; neither can they satisfy the emotions which they but feebly discipline. Their place is being slowly, but surely, and more effectively, filled by a theory which, interpreting the “mighty sum of things,” substitutes clear conceptions of unbroken order and relation between phenomena, in place of hazy conceptions of intermittent interferences; a theory which gives more than it takes away. For if men are deprived of belief in the pseudo-mysteries coined in a pre-scientific age, their wonder is fed, and their inquiry is stimulated, by the consciousness of the impenetrable mysteries of the Universe.

INDEX