of human thought, and Huxley himself was the guest to whom the whole University was doing honour.  Graduates from all parts of England had come to hear what, it was feared, might be his last public speech, and practically every member of the University who could gain admission was present.  The press of the world attended to report his words as if they were those of a great political leader, about to decide the fate of nations.  Although his voice had lost much of its old sonorous reach, and although the old clear rhythms were occasionally broken by hesitancies, the magic of his personality oriented to him every face.

It is a curious and striking circumstance, a circumstance fully recognised by Huxley himself, that in this exposition of his ethical conception of the Cosmos he reconstructed, on the lines of his evolutionary philosophy one of the oldest and most widespread theories, a theory again and again reached by men of different civilisations and epochs.  Manes, the Persian, from whose name the word “Manicheism” has been coined to denote his doctrine, taught in perhaps the most explicit fashion that the Cosmos was the battle-ground of two contending powers,—­Ahriman, the principle of evil, and Ormuzd, the principle of good.  This doctrine in some form or other is implicit in most of the greater religions, some of which have assumed an ultimate triumph for the principle of good, while others have left the issue doubtful.  The Ahriman of Huxley, the principle of evil, is what he termed the cosmic process, that great play of forces, by which, in a ruthless struggle for existence, the fittest (by which is meant the most suited to the surrounding conditions and not necessarily the ethically best) have survived at the expense of the less fit.  The Ormuzd, the principle of good, is what Huxley called the Ethical process, the process by which sentient, intelligent, and moral man has striven to replace the “old ape and tiger methods” of the cosmic process, by methods in which justice and mercy, sacrifice and consideration for others have a part.

To explain clearly the distinction he made between the ethical and cosmic processes.  Huxley, in the prefatory essay ("Prolegomena”) published in the volume with his Romanes lecture, developed the analogy of a cultivated garden reclaimed from surrounding wild nature.  He described how the countryside, visible from his windows at Eastbourne, had certainly been in a “state of nature” about two thousand years ago when Caesar had set foot in Britain and had made the Roman camps, the remains of which still mark the chalk downs of England.

“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 made no mark upon it; and the thin veil of vegetation which overspread the broad-backed heights and the shelving sides of the coombs was unaffected by his industry.  The native grasses and weeds, the scattered patches