264 Thomas Henry Huxley 



lively trutli springs up, as fresh green follows the de- 

 vastations of fire. 



To most of us it seems of sufficient importance and 

 of sufficient difficult}- to make our decisions in the little 

 eddies of good and evil that form as the world-stream 

 breaks round our individual lives. Huxley strove to 

 interpret the world-stream itself, to translate its move- 

 ments into the ethical language of man. As knowledge 

 of the forces and movements of the Cosmos has increased 

 so has our general conception been intensified, our con- 

 ception of it as a wondrous display of power and 

 grandeur and superhuman fixity of order. But are 

 the forces of the Cosmos good or evil ? Are we, and 

 the Cosmos of which we are a part, the sport of change- 

 able and capricious deities, the pawns in a game of the 

 gods, as some of the Greeks held ; or of a power drunk- 

 enly malicious, as Heine once cynically suggested ; or 

 a battle-ground for a force of good and a force of evil 

 as in so many Eastern religions? Are we dominated 

 b}^ pure evil, as some dark creeds have held, or by 

 pure good, as the religion of the Western world teaches ? 

 And if we are dominated by pure evil, whence come 

 good and the idea of good, or, if by pure good, whence 

 evil and the idea of evil ? 



Huxley's interest in these great problems appears 

 and reappears throughout his published writings, but 

 his views are most clearl}' and systematically exposed 

 in his " Romanes " lecture on " Evolution and Ethics " 

 delivered and published at Oxford in 1894, and after- 

 wards republished with a prefatory essay in the last 

 volume of his Collected Essays. Not long before his 

 death. Professor Romanes, who had come to live in 

 Oxford, founded a University lectureship, the purpose 

 of which was that once a year a distinguished man 



