334 LITE OF PROFESSOR HUXLEY CHAP. XIII 



morality of the cosmos on the score of its having begotten 

 morality in one small part of its domain. — Ever yours 

 very faithfully, T. H. Huxley. 



To Mr. G S ' 



HODESLEA, Oct. 31, 1894. 



Dear Ma S " Liver," " lumbago," and other small 



ills the flesh is heir to, have been making me very lazy 

 lately, especially about letter-writing. 



You have got into the depths where the comprehensible 

 ends in the incomprehensible — where the symbols which 

 may be used with confidence so far begin to get shaky. 



It does not seem to me absolutely necessary that matter 

 should be composed of solid particles. The " atoms " may 

 be persistent whirlpools of a continuous "substance" — 

 which substance, if at rest, could not affect us (all sensory 

 impression being dependent on motion) and subsequently 

 would for us = 0. The evolution of matter would be the 

 getting under weigh of this "nothing for us" until it 

 became the " something for us," the different motions of 

 which give us the mental states we call the qualities of 

 things. 



But it needs a very steady head to walk safely among 

 these abysses of thought, and the only use of letting the 

 mind range among them is as a corrective to the hasty 

 dogmatism of the so-called materialists, who talk just as 

 glibly of that of which they know nothing as the most 

 bigoted of the orthodox. 



Here also stand two letters to Lord Farrer, one 

 before, the other after, his address at the Statistical 

 Society on the Relations between Morals, Economics 

 and Statistics, which touch on several philosophical 

 and social questions, always, to his mind, intimately 



1 See p. 310. 



