INTRODUCTION xvii 



Huxley passed on to others what nature had revealed to 

 him. He was regardless, also, of the confusion and pain 

 which his view would necessarily bring to those who had 

 been nourished in old traditions. To stand with a man or 

 two and to do battle with the world on the score of its old 

 beliefs, has never been an easy task since the world began. 

 Certainly it required fearlessness and determination to 

 wrestle with the prejudices against science in the middle 

 of the nineteenth century how much may be gathered 

 from the reading of Darwin's Life and Letters. The atti- 

 tude of the times toward science has already been indicated. 

 One may be allowed to give one more example from the 

 reported address of a clergyman. " ye men of science, ye 

 men of science, leave us our ancestors in paradise, and you 

 may have yours in Zoological gardens." The war was, for 

 the most part, between the clergy and the men of science, 

 but it is necessary to remember that Huxley fought not 

 against Christianity, but against dogma ; that he fought not 

 against the past, he had great reverence for the accom- 

 plishment of the past, but against unwillingness to accept 

 the new truth of the present. 



A scholar of the highest type and a fearless defender of 

 true and honest thinking, Huxley certainly was: but the 

 quality which gives meaning to his work, which A scholar 

 makes it live, is a certain human quality due to 

 the fact that Huxley was always keenly alive to 

 the relation of science to the problems of life. For this 

 reason, he was not content with the mere acquirement of 

 knowledge ; and for this reason, also, he could not quietly 

 wait until the world should come to his way of thinking. 

 Much of the time, therefore, which he would otherwise 

 naturally have spent in research, he spent in contending 

 for and in endeavoring to popularize the facts of science. 

 It was this desire to make his ideas prevail that led Hux- 

 ley to work for a mastery of the technique of speaking and 

 writing. He hated both, but -taught himself to do both 

 well. The end of all his infinite pains about his writing 

 was not because style for its own sake is worth while, but 

 because he saw that the only way to win men to a consid- 



