240 Thomas Henry Huxley 



tiot to be cast out by Beelzebub, so morality is not to be estab- 

 lished by immorality. It is, we are told, the special peculiarity 

 of the devil that he was a liar from the begiuniug. If we set 

 out in life with pretending to know that which we do not 

 know ; with professing to accept for proof evidence which we 

 are well aware is inadequate ; with wilfully shutting our eyes 

 and our ears to facts which militate against this or that com- 

 fortable hypothesis ; we are assuredly doing our best to deserve 

 the same character." 



Freedom of thought meant for Huxley all that is 

 best in liberalism applied to life. In an essay on 

 Joseph Priestley, he described the condition of aflfairs 

 in England last centur}', when scientific investigation 

 and all forms of independent thinking laboured under 

 the most heavy restrictions that could be imposed by 

 dominant ecclesiastical and civil prejudice. He pointed 

 out the astounding changes between these times and 

 the times of to-day. 



" If we ask," he wrote, " what is the deeper meaning of all 

 these vast changes, there can be but one reply. They mean 

 that reason has asserted and exercised her primacy over all the 

 provinces of human activity ; that ecclesiastical authority has 

 been relegated to its proper place ; that the good of the gov- 

 erned has been finally recognised as the end of government, 

 and the complete responsibility of governors to the people as 

 its means ; and that the dependence of natural phenomena in 

 general on the laws of action of what we call matter has 

 become an axiom." 



The common ground of those who advocate the dut}^ 

 of belief and those who insist on the duty of doubt is 

 clear. Both are agreed as to the necessity of accepting 

 whatever has sufficient evidence to support it ; both 

 agree that there is room for doubt though not neces- 

 sarily for rejection in cases where the evidence is con- 

 taminated or insufficient. It is in the application that 



