320 



LIFE OF PROFESSOR HUXLEY CHAP, xvm 



ion that his service should be counted acceptable, and that no 

 one has a right to ask more of him than faithful performance of 

 the duties he has undertaken. I venture to count it an improb- 

 able suggestion that any such person a man, let us say, who has 

 well-nigh reached his threescore years and ten, and has gradu- 

 ated 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 criti- 

 cism. It seems to me incredible that such an one can have done 

 his day's work, always with a light heart, with no sense of 

 responsibility, no terror of that which may appear when the 

 factitious veil of Isis the thick web of fiction man has woven 

 round nature is stripped off. 



Challenged to state his "mental bias, pro or con," with 

 regard to such matters as Creation, Providence, etc., he re- 

 iterates his words written thirty-two years before : 



So far back as 1860 I wrote : 



" The doctrine of special creation owes its existence very 

 largely to the supposed necessity of making science accord with 

 the Hebrew cosmogony ;' : and that the hypothesis of special 

 creation is, in my judgment, a '' mere specious mask for our 

 ignorance." Not content with negation, I said : 



" Harmonious order governing eternally continuous prog- 

 ress ; the web and woof of matter and force interweaving by 

 slow degrees, without a broken thread, that veil which lies be- 

 tween us and the infinite ; that universe which alone we know, 

 or can know; such is the picture which science draws of the 

 world." 



. . . Every reader of Goethe will know that the second is 

 little more than a paraphrase of the well-known utterance of the 

 " Zeitgeist "' in Faust, which surely is something more than a 

 mere negation of the clumsy anthropomorphism of special cre- 

 ation. 



Follows a query about " Providence," my answer to which 

 must depend upon what my questioner means by that substan- 

 tive, whether alone, or qualified by the adjective " moral." 



If the doctrine of a Providence is to be taken as the expres- 

 sion, in a way " to be understanded of the people," of the total 

 exclusion of chance from a place even in the most insignificant 

 corner of Nature, if it means the strong conviction that the 



