accumulation of argument upon argument, in the logical subordination of details to the whole, in fact, in the arts of the convinced, positive, and logical thinker, who knew exactly what he meant you to know and who set about telling you it with the least possible concern for the words he used or for the sentences into which he formed his words.  The ideas and their ordering are the root and the branches, the beginning and the end of his style.  To put it in another way:  it would be extremely easy to translate any of Huxley’s writings into French or German, and they would lose extremely little of the personal flavour of their author.  The present writer has just been reading French translations of Huxley’s Physiography and Crayfish, made at different times by different translators.  At first reading it seems almost miraculous how identically the effect produced by the original is reproduced by the French rendering, but the secret is really no secret at all.  Huxley produced his effects by the ordering of his ideas and not by the ordering of his words.  From the technical point of view of literary craftsmanship, he cannot be assigned a high place; he is one of our great English writers, but he is not a great writer of English.

CHAPTER XIII

THE OPPONENT OF MATERIALISM

Science and Metaphysics—­Berkeley, Hume, and Hobbes—­Existence of Matter and Mind—­Descartes’s Contribution—­Materialism and Idealism—­Criticism of Materialism—­Berkeley’s Idealism—­Criticism of Idealism—­Empirical Idealism—­Materialism as opposed to Supernaturalism—­Mind and Brain—­Origin of Life—­Teleology, Chance, and the Argument from Design.

The prosecution of independent thinking in any branch of knowledge leads to the ultimate problems of philosophy.  The mathematician cannot ponder over the meaning of his figures, the chemist that of his reactions, the biologist that of his tissues and cells, the psychologist that of sensations and conceptions, without being tempted from the comparatively secure ground of observations and the arrangement of observations into the perilous regions of metaphysics.  Most scientific men return quickly, repelled and perhaps a little scared by the baffling confusion of that windy region of thought where no rules of logic seem incontrovertible, no conclusions tenable, and no discussions profitable.  Huxley, however, not only entered into metaphysical questions with enthusiasm, but gave a great deal of time to the study of some of the great metaphysical writers.  His views are to be found scattered through very many of his ordinary scientific writings, but are specially set forth in a volume on Hume, which he wrote for Mr. John Morley’s series, English Men of Letters, and in essays on Berkeley and on Descartes, all of which are republished in the Collected Essays.  He contrived to preserve, in the most abstrusely philosophical of these writings,