THE LESSON OF THE LIFE OF HUXLEY. 709 



really so in the most literal meaning- of the word? And if any of my 

 acts are really spontaneous, is not my responsibility for them complete i 



If, for all we know, or can expect to know, our moral responsibility 

 may be complete, is not this all one for all practical and intellectual 

 and moral ends, as if it were known to be complete? If wise and 

 prudent, must not he who does not know whether his liability is 

 limited or unlimited act as if it were unlimited? Is it not practically 

 unlimited if he knows no limit, and may it not be actually so? 



Ma}^ not the eloquent words in which Huxley teaches the advisable- 

 ness of improving natural knowledge be more true to nature tliuu the 

 ecclesiastical dogma that there is only vanity and vexation of spirit in 

 our attempts to seek and to search out by wisdom concerning the 

 things that are done under the sun; because our conduct, being pai-t 

 and parcel of the cosmic process, can be nothing more than the empty 

 and meaningless accompaniment of the predestined activity of oui" 

 bodily machinery ? 



Like all strong men of intellect, oppressed by the burden of that 

 endless malady of thought which infests us, Huxley devoted the best 

 of his powers to a search for the meaning of that natural world which 

 we tind so full of delight and entertainment and instruction, and also 

 so full of pain and sorrow and evil. The problem of ethics was never 

 far from his thoughts, and it is, no doubt, Avith this in mind that he 

 warns us it is better to think wrongly than to think confusedly, because 

 he who is obscure can come to no stable conclusion, while he who is 

 wrong may, if his mind be clear, some day run against a fact which 

 may set him right. 



No one who is perplexed by the awful majesty of nature, and by the 

 mystery of our own relation to the world around us, can fail to tind 

 profit in Huxley's reflections, for they are always fearless and honest 

 and clear, even"^if they may be hard to reconcile with one another. 



When in his early manhood, death first invades his home and takes 

 his first-born little son, he tells us, in a letter to a sympathetic friend: 

 -The more I know intimatelv of the lives of other men (to say noth- 

 ing of my own) the more obvious to me is it that the wicked does not 

 flourish nor is the righteous punished. But for this to be c ear we 

 must bear in mind what almost all forget, that the rewards of hie arc 

 contingent upon obedience to the whole law-physicjil as well as 

 moral-and that moral obedience will not atone for physical sin, or 



"^r^lst public utterance in his old ag., ^^ tells us: '^f the., is 

 a generalization from the facts of human lite whidj ^as he a>s^ o 

 all thoughtful men in every age and country, it is that the viola i of 



all thouehtful men in every age ana counuv, ... -^ -"- -■- 



rthlal rules constantly escapes the V^f^'^^"^^"^^^^'^'^''■ 



that the wicked flourishes like a green bay tree: that the sins 



