INTRODUCTION 



THE pursuit of truth was the keynote of Huxley's 

 life and work. Not that he was always right; as Sam 

 Slick said, "there is a great deal of human nature in all 

 mankind." Like the rest of us, though we must admit 

 less often than the rest of us, he sometimes mistook 

 error for truth; he held at various times, perhaps even 

 at the same time, ideas inconsistent with one another. 

 He was right more often than we, however, and he was 

 able to add to the world's knowledge, to the sum of 

 truth, not only because he had early learned from Car- 

 lyle the hatred of cant, humbugs, and shams, but also 

 because his conception of truth provided a method of 

 discovering and rejecting error. Huxley never regarded 

 truth as final, but always as progressive. Like the 

 pragmatist, he held it impossible to establish fixed and 

 eternal truth by discovering and reasoning from the so- 

 called laws of the universe; he_rather sought by obser- 

 vation, deduction, and verification i.e., by the scientific 

 method to generalise the facts of existence as we 

 find them, and thus to arrive at rational certainty. In 

 the scientific field, which was particularly his own, and 

 which lends itself to a strict method of truth seeking 

 and finding more readily (but no more justly) than do 

 abstract subjects, this method was highly successful and 

 led to the establishment of important truth. In the 

 field of ethics, however, Huxley was less successful. 

 His most valuable work there was destructive in ex- 

 posing by his method of verification the fallacy of de- 



