54 HUXLEY MEMORIAL LECTURES 



we accept Matthew Arnold^s_ view jhajL-the.- pur- 

 suit of letters consists in the acquainting oneself 

 with the best which has been thought and said in 

 the world, Huxley was literary; if we accept the 

 same writer's definition of religion that it is 

 morality heightened, kindled, lit up by feeling, 

 Huxley was religious. And it was the combina- 

 tion in him of science with literature and religion 

 which made him so great a force in the England 

 of the Victorian age. 



I never had the honour of personal contact with 

 Huxley, but I heard him speak more than once, 

 and his writings have deeply interested me since 

 I was a child. I owe him a debt, which I may 

 best pay by trying to combine as he did the 

 fanaticism of veracity which marks the man of 

 science with the broad outlook on human life 

 which belongs to the man of letters. But the last 

 quarter of a century has been a time of rapid, of 

 constantly accelerated, intellectual movement, 

 and Huxley, who was himself ever on the crest of 

 the advancing wave, would condemn me if I did 

 not try to penetrate further than he did into some 

 of the tendencies of thought which are ever ebb- 

 ing and flowing, and are now more clearly to be 

 discerned than they were twenty years ago. 



I. 



I have taken as my subject Rationalism and 

 Science, in relation to social movements, and I 

 must begin by trying to explain in what sense I 



