266 Thomas Henry Huxley 



hesitancies, the magic of his personaHty oriented to 

 him even' face. 



It is a curious and striking circumstance, a circum- 

 stance fully recognised by Huxley himself, that in this 

 exposition of his ethical conception of the Cosmos he 

 reconstructed, on the lines of his evolutionary philo- 

 sophy one of the oldest and most widespread theories, a 

 theor}^ again and again reached by men of different civil- 

 isations and epochs. Manes, the Persian, from whose 

 name the word " Manicheism " has been coined to 

 denote his doctrine, taught in perhaps the most explicit 

 fashion that the Cosmos was the battle-ground of two 

 contending powers, — Ahriman, the principle of evil, 

 and Ormuzd, the principle of good. This doctrine in 

 some form or other is implicit in most of the greater re- 

 ligions, some of which have assumed an ultimate tri- 

 ixmph for the principle of good, while others have left 

 the issue doubtful. The Ahriman of Huxley, the prin- 

 ciple of evil, is what he termed the cosmic process, that 

 great pla}' of forces, by which, in a ruthless struggle for 

 existence, the fittest (b}- which is meant the most suited 

 to the surrounding conditions and not necessarih^ the 

 ethically best) have survived at the expense of the less 

 fit. The Ormuzd, the principle of good, is what Hux- 

 ley called the Ethical process, the process b)^ which 

 sentient, intelligent, and moral man has striven to replace 

 the " old ape and tiger methods " of the cosmic process, 

 by methods in which justice and mercy, sacrifice and 

 consideration for others have a part. 



To explain clearh' the distinction he made between the 

 ethical and cosmic processes, Huxley, in the prefatory 

 essay (" Prolegomena ") published in the volume with 

 his Romanes lecture, developed the analogy of a culti- 

 vated garden reclaimed from surrounding wild nature. 



