INTRODUCTION xvii 



as intellectual." The essence of this principle is his 

 theory of truth, "that it is wrong for a man to say 

 that he is certain of the objective truth of any proposi- 

 tion unless he can produce evidence which logically 

 justifies that certainty." On the other hand he denied 

 and repudiated "as immoral . . . the contrary doc- 

 trine, that there are propositions which men ought to 

 believe, without logically satisfactory evidence." In 

 obedience to this principle he was unable to believe in 

 the doctrine of immortality, since to do so seemed to 

 him to mean accepting desire as a basis of truth. "Nor 

 does it help to tell me that the aspirations of mankind 

 that my own highest aspirations even lead me 

 towards the doctrine of immortality. I doubt the fact, 

 to begin with, but if it be so even, what is this but in 

 grand words asking me to believe a thing because I 

 like it." 



Huxley's belief that even the evidence for religion must 

 be subjected to the same test of verification as any other 

 sort of truth led him to deny the accuracy of much 

 Biblical and ecclesiastical history. His criticism of the 

 "Mosaic" authorship of the Pentateuch and the tra- 

 ditional authorship of the Gospels, his challenge of the 

 scientific correctness of the Biblical account of Creation 

 and the Flood, and of the "demonology of primitive 

 Christianity" brought upon him the unmerited reproach 

 of hating Christianity and of wantonly attacking the 

 Bible. As a result he became involved in a heated 

 controversy with Gladstone and some less distinguished 

 champions, who feared that the fate of religion itself 

 depended upon the literal acceptance of ecclesiastical tra- 

 dition as well as of the Bible. Two volumes of Huxley's 

 Collected Essays, Science and Hebrew Tradition, and 

 Science and Christian Tradition, contain his contributions 

 to this controversy, and include some of his most 



