28 HUXLEY MEMORIAL LECTURES 



children, or at young men and women; early in 

 life he began to put his shoulder to the wheel in 

 the great task of educating the people, of teach- 

 ing the great public of all sorts and conditions, 

 high and low, rich and poor, the main truths which 

 in his opinion ought to guide them in the conduct 

 of life ; and as the years went on the call to fulfil 

 this task seemed to him more and more urgent. 

 He passed from the chair of the professor to the 

 pulpit of the preacher, and in the later years of 

 his life gave himself up almost wholly to the issue 

 of writings which he himself acknowledged to be 

 of the kind which men call sermons. Any 

 attempt to describe Huxley's influence on his 

 fellows and his place in the world which did not 

 give ample room for the consideration of this side 

 of his life and this direction of his labours would 

 be a wholly vain one. 



Following out his favourite analogy of a 

 machine, he recognised in man, on the one hand, 

 a moving power, or rather moving powers, and, on 

 the other hand, directive agencies by which the 

 movements set going by the power, in other 

 words, the acts of man, are shaped so as to accom- 

 plish this and that end. Early in life he had 

 come to the conclusion that these directive agen- 

 cies were to be found in knowledge, in natural 

 knowledge, and in this alone. He was convinced 

 that the true conduct of life was that which was 

 in accordance with the laws of nature, and that a 

 knowledge of those laws could alone supply a 



