HUXLEY' 8 LIFE AND WORK. 353 



earliest opportunity of parading it at our Society, to show that I, too, 

 had a tail like the other foxes." 



Huxley denied that he was disposed to rank himself either as a 

 fatalist, a materialist or an atheist. "Not among fatalists, for I take 

 the conception of necessity to have a logical, and not a physical, founda- 

 tion; not among materialists, for I am utterly incapable of conceiving 

 the existence of matter if there is no mind in which to picture that 

 existence; not among atheists, for the problem of the ultimate cause of 

 existence is one which seems to me to be hopelessly out of reach of my 

 poor powers." 



The late Duke of Argyll, in his interesting work on 'The Philosophy 

 of Belief,' makes a very curious attack on Huxley's consistency. He 

 observes that scientific writers use "forms of expression as well as in- 

 dividual words, all of which are literally charged with teleological mean- 

 ing. Men even who would rather avoid such language if they could, 

 but who are intent on giving the most complete and expressive descrip- 

 tion they can of the natural facts before them, find it wholly impossible 

 to discharge this duty by any other means. Let us take as an example 

 the work of describing organic structures in the science of biology. 

 The standard treatise of Huxley on the 'Elements of Comparative 

 Anatomy,' affords a remarkable example of this necessity, and of its re- 

 sults. . . . 



"How unreasonable it is to set aside, or to explain away, the full 

 meaning of such words as 'apparatuses' and 'plans,' comes out strongly 

 when we analyze the preconceived assumptions which are supposed to 

 be incompatible with the admission of it. . . . 



"To continue the use of words because we are conscious that we 

 cannot do without them, and then to regret or neglect any of their im- 

 plications, is the highest crime we can commit against the only faculties 

 which enable us to grasp the realities of the world." Is not this, how- 

 ever, to fall into the error of some Greek philosophers, and to regard 

 language, not only as a means of communication, but as an instrument 

 of research. We all speak of sunrise and sunset, but it is no proof 

 that the sun goes round the earth. The Duke himself says elsewhere: 



"We speak of time as if it were an active agent in doing this, that 

 and the other. Yet we are quite conscious, when we choose to think 

 of it, that when we speak of time in this sense, we are really thinking 

 and speaking, not of time itself, but of the various physical forces which 

 operate slowly and continuously in, or during, time. Apart from these 

 forces, time does nothing." 



This is, it seems to me, a complete reply to his own attack on Hux- 

 ley's supposed inconsistency. 



Theologians often seem to speak as if it were possible to believe 

 something which one cannot understand, as if the belief were a matter 



VOL. LVIII.— 23 



