INTRODUCTION xix 



flourishes. "Of moral purpose," he said, "I see no trace 

 in Nature. That is an article of exclusively human 

 manufacture and very much to our credit." Huxley 

 really has two systems of morality, one derived partly 

 by the method he condemned, from a priori reasoning 

 about the laws of nature and the laws of society, the 

 other by observation and experiment. According to the 

 first the law of nature is the law of the struggle for 

 existence, and teaches man to cultivate self-assertion in 

 order that he may survive in that struggle. The law 

 which governs human society, on the other hand, "com- 

 mands the sacrifice of the self to the common good" and 

 develops the quality of self-restraint. But in making 

 self-assertion the necessary virtue of man in a state of 

 nature and self-restraint the virtue of man in society, 

 Huxley was following not the evidence of experience 

 but the old error of identifying the self with the lower 

 impulses instead of with all man's interests. As a result 

 he involves man in a hopeless dilemma. If he makes 

 self-assertion the law of his being, society is impossible; 

 if he makes self-restraint his law, he becomes the victim 

 either of less virtuous men or of nature, which is always 

 waiting to reduce him to the level from which he has 

 risen by cultivating the opposite quality. Moreover he 

 makes sympathy the basis of moral conduct and the 

 'golden rule" a "negation of law by the refusal to put 

 it in motion against law-breakers." What he overlooked 

 is that man needs neither unlimited expansion nor mere 

 restraint but development in the direction of a moral 

 ideal. 



In his other system of morals, which is not of course 

 distinct from the one I have just briefly described, 

 Huxley recognised that men have such moral ideals. 

 The aim of morality is then the preservation of society 

 so that the "individual may reach the fullest and highest 



