SOURCE: "Evolution and Ethics in its Victorian Context," in Evolution & Ethics: T. H. Huxley's Evolution and Ethics, With New Essays on its Victorian and Sociobiological Context, Princeton University Press, 1989, pp. 3-55.

In this essay, Paradis discusses the social and political implications of Huxley's "Prolegomena" and "Evolution and Ethics."

In the summer of 1892, three years before his death, an ailing T. H. Huxley wrote the celebrated lecture "Evolution and Ethics," which he delivered at Oxford University the afternoon of May 18, 1893. The lecture, together with the "Prolegomena," an introductory essay completed in June of 1894, set traditional humanistic values in direct conflict with the physical realities revealed by nineteenth-century science. The forces of nature, seen by Huxley in terms of powerful material and instinctual laws, were poised, he now argued, against civilization and the future of humanity.

Huxley built his two essays on a domestic foundation, using a wealth of autobiographical...