220 LIFE OF PROFESSOR HUXLEY cHAP. ix 



Eomanes Lecture, upon which he was still at work. 

 It is more specifically expressed in the succeeding 

 paragraph : — 



I hear much of the "ethics of evohition." I apprehend 

 that, in the broadest sense of the term " evohition," there 

 neither is, nor can he, any such thing. The notion that 

 the doctrine of evokition can furnish a foundation for 

 morals seems to me to be an illusion which has arisen 

 from the unfortunate ambiguity of the term " fittest " in 

 the formula, "survival of the fittest." We commonly 

 use " fittest " in a good sense, with an understood connota- 

 tion of " best " ; and " best " we are apt to take in its 

 ethical sense. But the " fittest " which survives in the 

 struggle for existence may be, and often is, the ethically 

 worst. 



Another paragraph explains the sense in which he 

 used to say that the Romanes Lecture was a very 

 orthodox discourse on the text, " Satan, the Prince 

 of this world " : — 



It is the secret of the superiority of the best theological 

 teachers to the majority of their opponents that they 

 substantially recognise these realities of things, however 

 strange the forms in which they clothe their conceptions. 

 The doctrines of predestination, of original sin, of the 

 innate depravity of man and the evil fate of the greater 

 part of the race, of the primacy of Satan in this world, 

 of the essential vileness of matter, of a malevolent 

 Demiurgus subordinate to a benevolent Almighty, who 

 has only lately revealed himself, faulty as they are, appear 

 to me to be vastly nearer the truth than the " liberal " 

 popular illusions that babies are all born good, and that 

 the example of a corrupt society is responsible for their 

 failure to remain so ; that it is given to everybody to reach 

 the ethical ideal if he will only try ; that all partial evil 



