S40 president's address. 



The late Pi'of. Huxley, in the last of his memorable and 

 striking utterances, once again proclaims his deeply-rooted faith 

 in the ultimate unity of all " cosmic process," expressing itself in 

 secular evolution But he found himself, nevertheless, com- 

 pelled to postulate within this process a kind of countermove- 

 ment as regards natural selection, when he is considering certain 

 aspects of human evolution. 



" The faith that is born of knowledge," Prof. Huxley says, 

 " finds its object in an eternal order, bringing forth ceaseless 

 change through endless time, in endless space; the manifestations 

 of the cosmic energy alternating between phases of potentiality 

 and phases of explication." 



The aspect of cosmic activity which the great apostle of 

 evolution singles out for special treatment in the essay to which I 

 allude, is what we may call the human episode in the cosmic 

 process. This episode, you may remember, he sets forth under 

 the metaphor of a garden, cut off from the unreclaimed bush of 

 general cosmic activity, and tended, watered, and otherAvise pro. 

 tected from the incursions of wild animals and the hurtful com- 

 petition of noxious and undesii^able plants. He is not concerned 

 with the origination of the garden, for obviously this must be 

 regarded as in some sense due to the operation of the ordinary 

 laws which govern the entire region. The domesticated area 

 must in some natural way have become shut off from the wild- 

 wood. But he is specially concerned with the fact that, given 

 such a garden, the denizens of it are now largely protected from 

 the operation of the ordinary natural and competitive conditions 

 prevailing outside its limits. By this he attempts to convey the 

 notion that one aspect of the result of human evolution by 

 natural selection has been the limitation, within the garden of 

 human society, of the operation of those very conditions of 

 struggle and survival to which its genesis is owing. And he 

 accordingly proclaims the "apparent paradox" that "ethical 

 nature while born of cosmic naturg is necessarily at war with its 

 parent." 



