vi INTRODUCTION 



pending too much upon absolute authority. When he 

 undertook, however, to build up his own system of 

 ethics, he had not the same command of evidence that 

 he had in science, and he sometimes accepted assump- 

 tions which a rigid application of his method would 

 have led him to reject. 



To one who insists upon an immutable, absolute truth, 

 Huxle'y may well seem not to arrive at truth at all; 

 indeed he admitted that "it may fairly be doubted 

 whether any generalisation, or hypothesis, based upon 

 physical data is absolutely true, in the sense that a 

 mathematical proposition is so." And he bases "ra- 

 tional certainty" upon two grounds: "the one that the 

 evidence in favour of a given statement is as good as 

 it can be"- when "the statement is to be taken as 

 true"; the other, "that such evidence is plainly insuffi- 

 cient," when it is untrue. But in each case it is true 

 or false only "until something arises to modify the 

 verdict, which, however properly reached, may always 

 be more or less wrong, the best information being never 

 complete, and the best reasoning being liable to fallacy." 

 This pragmatic kind of truth is, however, more rather 

 than less dependable than so-called absolute truth be- 

 cause, as Huxley points out, since the errors of such 

 scientific generalisation "can become apparent only out- 

 side the limits of practicable observation, it may be just 

 as usefully adopted . . . as if it were absolutely true." 

 The justification of employing such postulates "as 

 axioms of physical philosophy, lies in the circumstance 

 that expectations logically based upon them are verified, 

 or at any rate, not contradicted, whenever they can be 

 tested by experience." Truth which rests upon authority 

 or a priori assumption, on the other hand, defies both 

 changing circumstances and verification of its dicta. A 

 recent critic of Huxley, Mr. Paul Elmer More, condemns 



