INTRODUCTION vii 



Huxley's use of uncontradicted as well as verified hy- 

 potheses because, he says, the way to truth does not 

 lie through error. That assertion seems to me less well 

 founded than Bacon's saying, reiterated by Huxley, 

 that "truth more easily comes out of error than out of 

 confusion." This is certainly the case when one is 

 armed with Huxley's habit of testing every hypothesis 

 by bringing in all the evidence available "is the evi- 

 dence adequate to bear out the theory, or is it not?"- 

 and his determination to "rest in no lie, and to rest in 

 no verbal delusions." 



The perception that truth is not final did not, as I 

 said at starting, prevent Huxley from regarding it as 

 the immediate jewel of his soul. Perhaps indeed truth 

 is to be the more jealously cherished when every man 

 bears the responsibility of discovering and preserving 

 it. At any rate Huxley conceived highly of his duty 

 to truth, watched anxiously his worthiness to serve it, 

 and was resolved greatly to find quarrel in a straw when 

 truth was at the stake. He wrote to his sister in 1850: 



"I will leave my mark somewhere, and it shall be clear and 

 distinct | T.H.H., his mark. | and free from the abominable- blur 

 of cant, humbug, and self-seeking which surrounds everything 

 in this present world that is to say, supposing that I am 

 not already unconsciously tainted myself, a result of which I 

 have a morbid dread." 



After forty years his adherence to truth was but 

 strengthened by the battles he had waged in her name 

 against adversaries superior in numbers, entrenched in 

 ages old habits of thought, and fortified by ecclesiastical 

 authority. 



"Belief in majorities is not rooted in my breast, and if all 

 the world were against me the fact might warn me to revise 

 and criticise my opinions, but would not in itself supply a ghost 



