ZED REMINISCENCES OF HUXLEY 
even the slightest przma facze ground for a negative 
verdict... Nevertheless, he seems to have felt as if the 
absence of evidence did afford some such prima facze 
ground; for in a letter to Charles Kingsley, written in 
1860, soon after the sudden death of his first child, he 
says: “Had I lived a couple of centuries earlier, I 
could have fancied a devil scoffing at me . . . and ask- 
ing me what profit it was to have stripped myself of 
the hopes and consolations of the mass of mankind. 
To which my only reply was, and is, O devil! truth is 
better than much profit. I have searched over the 
grounds of my belief, and if wife and child and name 
and fame were all to be lost to me one after the other, 
as the penalty, still I will not lie.” This striking 
declaration shows that the second cause of the bias 
was the dread of self-deception. It was a noble exhi- 
bition of intellectual honesty raised to a truly Puritanic 
fervour of self-abnegation. Just because life is sweet, 
and the love of it well-nigh irrepressible, must all such 
feelings be suspected as tempters, and frowned out of 
our temple of philosophy? Rather than run any risk 
of accepting a belief because it is pleasant, let us incur 
whatever chance there may be of error in the opposite 
direction ; thus we shall at least avoid the one unpar- 
donable sin. Such, I think, was the shape which the 
case assumed in Huxley’s mind. To me it takes a 
very different shape; but I cannot help feeling that 
mankind is going to be helped by such stanch intel- 
lectual integrity as his far more than it is going to be 
helped by consoling doctrines of whatever sort; and 
therefore his noble self-abnegation, even though it may 
1 T have explained this point at some length in the “Unseen World,” 
Pp- 43-53- 
