iv MODERN E VOL UTION 245 



his replies to a prominent exponent of the Comtian 

 philosophy, that ' incongruous mixture of bad science 

 with eviscerated papistry,' as he calls it, Huxley pro- 

 tests against the idea that the teaching of science is 

 wholly negative. 



I venture, he says, to count it an improbable suggestion 

 that any one who has graduated in all the faculties of human 

 relationships ; who has taken his share in all the deep joys 

 and deeper anxieties which cling about them, who has felt 

 the burden of young lives entrusted to his care, and has 

 stood alone with his dead before the abyss of the Eternal 

 has never had a thought beyond negative criticism. 



That is the Agnostic position as he defined it ; 

 an attitude, not a creed ; and if he refused to affirm, 

 he equally refused to deny. 



Thus have the Pioneers of Evolution, clear-sighted 

 and sure-footed, led us by ways undreamed-of at the 

 start to a goal undreamed-of by the earliest among 

 them. To have halted on the route when the graver 

 difficulties of the road began would have made the 

 journey futile, and have left their followers in the 

 wilds. Evolution, applied to everything up to man, 

 but stopping at the stage when he appears, would 

 have remained a fascinating study, but would not 

 have become a guiding philosophy of life. It is in 

 the extension of its processes as explanation of all 

 that appertains to mankind that its abiding value 

 consists. That extension was inevitable. The old 

 theologies of civilised races, useful in their day, 

 because answering, however imperfectly, to perma- 

 nent needs of human nature, no longer suffice. 

 Their dogmas are traced as the lineal descendants 



