AUTOBIOGRAPHY 13 



me. I used to pity myself for having to go through this 

 training, but I am now more disposed to compassion- 

 ate the unfortunate audiences, especially my ever 

 friendly hearers at the Royal Institution, who were 

 the subjects of my oratorical experiments. 



The last thing that it would be proper for me to 

 do would be to speak of the work of my life, or to say 

 at the end of the day whether I think I have earned 

 my wages or not. Men are said to be partial judges 

 of themselves. Young men may be, I doubt if old men 

 are. Life seems terribly foreshortened as they look 

 back and the mountain they set themselves to climb in 

 youth turns out to be a mere spur of immeasurably 

 higher ranges when, by failing breath, they reach the 

 top. But if I may speak of the objects I have had more 

 or less definitely in view since I began the ascent of my 

 hillock, they are briefly these : To promote the increase 

 of natural knowledge and to forward the application 

 of scientific methods of investigation to all the prob- 

 lems of life to the best of my ability, in the conviction 

 which has grown with my growth and strengthened 

 with my strength, that there is no alleviation for the 

 sufferings of mankind except veracity of thought and 

 of action, and the resolute facing of the world as it is 

 when the garment of make-believe by which pious 

 hands have hidden its uglier features is stripped off. 

 v It is with this intent that I have subordinated any 

 reasonable, or unreasonable, ambition for scientific- 

 fame which I may have permitted myself to entertain 

 to other ends; to the popularization of science; to the 

 development and organisation of scientific education ; 

 to the endless series of battles and skirmishes over 

 evolution ; and to untiring opposition to that ecclesias- 

 tical spirit, that clericalism, which in England, as 



