xx INTRODUCTION 



life attainable by man." And the means of attaining 

 this end are "discoverable like the other so-called 

 laws of Nature by observation and experiment, and 

 only in that way." The rules of the game of life Huxley 

 compares to the draughtsman's rules for perspective. 

 The moral man has also a "moral sense" or "innate 

 sense of moral beauty" analogous to the artistic sense 

 and stronger in some men than in others. This moral 

 sense furnishes its possessors with the motive for doing 

 their duty which must be supplied to others by the "fear 

 of punishment in all its grades, from mere disapproba- 

 tion to hanging." These "men of moral genius" give us 

 our "ideals of duty and visions of moral perfection, 

 which ordinary mankind could never have attained: 

 though, happily for them, they can feel the beauty of 

 a vision" and can endeavour to reproduce "some faint 

 image of it in the actual world." They furnish the 

 "ethical ideals" without which neither human beings nor 

 human society can progress. On this basis Huxley 

 asserts that "the moral law, like the laws of physical 

 nature, rests in the long run upon instinctive intuitions, 

 and is neither more nor less 'innate' and 'necessary' than 

 they are." That it is still, like the laws of physical 

 nature, is discovered and verified by observation and 

 experience. 



But Huxley saw two finally insuperable obstacles put 

 by non-moral nature in the way of man's progress toward 

 his ideal of moral perfection: over-population, which 

 would eventually throw him back into the struggle for 

 existence, and the reversal of the evolutionary progress, 

 which would make his efforts useless. The contempla- 

 tion of this losing fight is infinitely depressing or 

 would be to one of less indomitable courage than Huxley. 

 In the conflict with nature man, he says, "in virtue of 

 his intelligence" is able so to "influence and modify the 



