Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/798

780 which he threw himself into this advocacy was merely a part of the larger purpose of his life. Science, or, to use the old phrase of the Royal Society, natural knowledge, had a twofold hold on Huxley. On the one hand, he felt deeply all the purely intellectual and, if we may use the word, selfish joys of fruitful progressive inquiry after truth. This was dominant in his early days, and to it we owe the long list of valuable researches of which I just now spoke, and which followed each other rapidly in the fifties and the sixties. On the other hand, feeling deeply, as he did, his duties as a citizen of the world, science laid hold of him as being the true and sure guide to conduct man in all his ways; and this latter working of science in him, evident even in early days (witness his Address to Workingmen at St. Martin's Hall in 1854), grew stronger and stronger as the years went on, until at last it took almost entire possession of him. To him, indeed, it may be said, science was all in all. He saw, as others see, in science a something which is broadening and strengthening human life by unceasingly bending Nature to the use of man, and making her resources subservient to his desires; he saw the material usefulness of science, but he saw something more. He saw also, as others see, in science a something in which the human mind, exercising and training itself, makes itself at once nimble and strong, and dwelling on which is raised to broad and high views of the nature of things; he saw in science a means of culture, but he saw something more. He saw in science even as it is, and still more in science as it will be, the sure and trustworthy guide of man in the dark paths of life. Many a man of science goes, or seems to others to go, through the world ordering his steps by two ways of thinking. When he is dealing with the matters the treatment of which has given him his scientific position, with physical or with biological problems, he thinks in one way; when he is dealing with other matters, those of morals and religion, he thinks in another way; he seems to have two minds, and to pass from the one to the other according to the subject-matter. It was not so with Huxley. He could not split himself or the universe into two halves, and treat the one and the other half by two methods radically distinct and in many ways opposed; he applied the one method, which he believed to be the true and fruitful one, to all problems without distinction. And as years came over him, the duty of making this view clear to others grew stronger and stronger. Relinquishing, not without bitter regret, little by little, the calm intellectual joys of the pursuit of narrower morphological problems, he became more and more the apostle of the scientific method, driven to the new career by the force of a pure altruism, not loving science the less but loving man the more. And his work in this respect was a double one: he had to teach his