To most of us it seems of sufficient importance and of sufficient difficulty to make our decisions in the little eddies of good and evil that form as the world-stream breaks round our individual lives.  Huxley strove to interpret the world-stream itself, to translate its movements into the ethical language of man.  As knowledge of the forces and movements of the Cosmos has increased so has our general conception been intensified, our conception of it as a wondrous display of power and grandeur and superhuman fixity of order.  But are the forces of the Cosmos good or evil?  Are we, and the Cosmos of which we are a part, the sport of changeable and capricious deities, the pawns in a game of the gods, as some of the Greeks held; or of a power drunkenly malicious, as Heine once cynically suggested; or a battle-ground for a force of good and a force of evil as in so many Eastern religions?  Are we dominated by pure evil, as some dark creeds have held, or by pure good, as the religion of the Western world teaches?  And if we are dominated by pure evil, whence come good and the idea of good, or, if by pure good, whence evil and the idea of evil?

Huxley’s interest in these great problems appears and reappears throughout his published writings, but his views are most clearly and systematically exposed in his “Romanes” lecture on “Evolution and Ethics” delivered and published at Oxford in 1894, and afterwards republished with a prefatory essay in the last volume of his Collected Essays.  Not long before his death, Professor Romanes, who had come to live in Oxford, founded a University lectureship, the purpose of which was that once a year a distinguished man should address the University on a subject neither religious nor political.  Mr. Gladstone was the first lecturer, and, at the suggestion of the founder, Huxley was chosen as the second.  For years he had been taking a special interest in both religion and politics, and he was not a little embarrassed by the restrictions imposed by the terms of the foundation, for he determined to make ethical science the subject of his address, and

“ethical science is, on all sides, so entangled with religion and politics, that the lecturer who essays to touch the former without coming in contact with either of the latter, needs all the dexterity of an egg-dancer, and may even discover that his sense of clearness and his sense of propriety come into conflict, by no means to the advantage of the former.”

As Huxley, on that great occasion, ascended the rostrum in the Sheldonian theatre, very white and frail in his scarlet doctor’s robes, there must have been present in his mind memories of the occasion, four-and-thirty years before, when he first addressed an audience in the University of Oxford.  Then he was a young man, almost unknown, rising to lead what seemed a forlorn hope for an idea utterly repugnant to most of his hearers.  Now, and largely by his own efforts, the idea had become an inseparable part