53 



RATIONALISM AND SCIENCE IN 

 RELATION TO SOCIAL MOVEMENTS. 



By Prof. Percy Gardner. 



Whether your Council have made a mistake in 

 the selection of the present Huxley lecturer it will 

 be for my audience to judge. But up to a certain 

 point I think they were certainly right. They 

 decided that when a lecture was founded to com- 

 memorate a man so many sided as Thomas 

 Huxley, justice could not be done to him if only 

 a succession of biologists were nominated to the 

 lectureship. I am older than most of my audi- 

 tors, and vividly remember the part which Huxley 

 played in the national life. He was not merely 

 an authority on biologic questions, a first-rate 

 lecturer on science and a prominent champion of 

 Darwinism, but also a man through whose clear 

 and powerful brain all the great questions of our 

 time circulated, finding there an alembic whence 

 they often issued altered and clarified. He was 

 not only a man of science but also a man of 

 letters, a philosopher, even in a degree a theo- 

 logian. He once said of Mr. Arthur Balfour 

 that he had science in his blood; we may say of 

 Huxley that he had literature in his blood. If 



