150 HUXLEY 



ingeniously discovered that a minute displacement of 

 the lines of their spectra gave a key to the direction 

 of the movements of the stars in space, while their 

 colours indicate whether they are in the stages of 

 youth, maturity, or decay. 



It is a far cry from the apelike man to the nebula, 

 and yet, in the foregoing rapid summary of cosmic 

 processes, no warrant can be found for assumption of 

 any break in causal relations. Nevertheless, when 

 Huxley made the naked statement that there is no 

 difference in kind between living and not-living mat- 

 ter; and when Tyndall, decking the same in rhetor- 

 ical garb, said that " all our philosophy, all our poetry, 

 all our science, all our art — Plato, Shakespeare, Newton 

 and Raphael — are potentia, in the fires of the sun," * 

 there can be little wonder that charges of the kind 

 made by the Presbytery of Belfast, that they " ignored 

 the existence of God, and advocated pure and simple 

 materialism," were levelled against them. 



Huxley anticipated this ; and in his Edinburgh 

 lecture, as later, more elaborately, in Hume and Helps 

 to the Study of Berkeley* he deals with subjects which 

 bring us face to face with the ultimate problems of 

 philosophy. He was no tyro in these : from his early 

 boyhood, when, reading Sir William Hamilton, he 



1 Fragments of Science, p. 453. 



2 These fill the sixth volume of Collected Essays. 



