PROLEGOMENA l 



IT may be safely assumed that, two thousand years 

 ago, before Caesar set foot in southern Britain, the 

 whole country-side visible from the windows of the room 

 in which I write, was in what is called "the state of 

 nature." Except, it may be, by raising a few sepulchral 

 mounds, such as those which still, here and there, break 

 the flowing contours of the downs, man's hands had 



1 Prolegomena was written in 1894 when Huxley, preparing to 

 publish his Evolution and Ethics, found it necessary to supply 

 a preface explaining some ideas which he had taken for generally 

 accepted, particularly what he considered the conflict between 

 the laws of society and of ethics and the laws of nature. Although 

 Huxley was extraordinarily successful in rendering new ideas in- 

 telligible to popular audiences, the discourse on Evolution and 

 Ethics is pretty difficult, and Huxley admitted his error and 

 repaired it by one of his finest essays. He says in the preface 

 that he had forgotten a "maxim touching lectures of a popu- 

 lar character, which has descended to me from that prince of 

 lecturers, Mr. Faraday. He was once asked by a beginner, called 

 upon to address a highly select and cultivated audience, what 

 he might suppose his hearers to know already. Whereupon the 

 past master of the art of exposition emphatically replied, 

 'Nothing!' 



"To my shame as a retired veteran, who has all his life profited 

 by this great precept of lecturing strategy, I forgot all about it 

 just when it would have been most useful. I was fatuous enough 

 to imagine that a number of propositions, which I thought 

 established, and which, in fact, I had advanced without chal- 

 lenge on former occasions, needed no repetition. 



"I have endeavoured to repair my error by prefacing the lecture 

 with some matter chiefly elementary or recapitulatory to 

 which I have given the title of 'Prolegomena.' I wish I could 



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