320 



LIFE OF PROFESSOR HUXLEY chap, xviii 



ion that his service should be counted acceptable, and that no 

 one has a right to ask more of him than faithful performance of 

 the duties he has undertaken. I venture to count it an improb- 

 able suggestion that any such person — a man, let us say, who has 

 well-nigh reached his threescore years and ten, and has gradu- 

 ated in all the faculties of human relationships; who has taken 

 his share in all the deep joys and deeper anxieties which cling 

 about them; who has felt the burden of young lives entrusted 

 to his care, and has stood alone with his dead before the abyss 

 of the eternal — has never had a thought beyond negative criti- 

 cism. It seems to me incredible that such an one can have done 

 his day's work, always with a light heart, with no sense of 

 responsibility, no terror of that which may appear when the 

 factitious veil of Isis — the thick web of fiction man has woven 

 round nature — is stripped off. 



Challenged to state his " mental bias, pro or con," with 

 regard to such matters as Creation, Providence, etc., he re- 

 iterates his words written thirty-two years before : — 



So far back as i860 I wrote : — 



" The doctrine of special creation owes its existence very 

 largely to the supposed necessity of making science accord with 

 the Hebrew cosmogony;" and that the hypothesis of special 

 creation is, in my judgment, a " mere specious mask for our 

 ignorance." Not content with negation, I said : — 



" Harmonious order governing eternally continuous prog- 

 ress ; the web and woof of matter and force interweaving by 

 slow degrees, without a broken thread, that veil which lies be- 

 tween us and the infinite ; that universe which alone we know, 

 or can know; such is the picture which science draws of the 

 world." 



. . . Every reader of Goethe will know that the second is 

 little more than a paraphrase of the well-known utterance of the 

 " Zeitgeist " in Faust, which surely is something more than a 

 mere negation of the clumsy anthropomorphism of special cre- 

 ation. 



Follows a query about " Providence," my answer to which 

 must depend upon what my questioner means by that substan- 

 tive, whether alone, or qualified by the adjective " moral." 



If the doctrine of a Providence is to be taken as the expres- 

 sion, in a way " to be understanded of the people," of the total 

 , exclusion of chance from a place even in the most insignificant 

 " corner of Nature, if it means the strong conviction that the 



