did not seem inclined to pursue the question of an external world, but said that though Mill's 'logic' was very good, empiricists were not bound by all his theories.

He characterised the book as a very good and even brilliant piece of work from a literary point of view; but as a helpful contribution to the great controversy, the most disappointing he had ever read. I said, 'There has been no adverse criticism of it yet.' He answered with emphasis, 'No! but there soon will be. From you?' I asked. 'I let out no secrets,' was the reply.

He then talked with great admiration and affection of Mr. Balfour's brother, Francis. His early death and W. K. Clifford's (Huxley said) had been the greatest loss to science—not only in England but in the world-in our time. 'Half a dozen of us old fogies could have been better spared.' He remembered Frank Balfour as a boy at Eton, and saw his unusual talent there. Then my friend, Michael Forster, took him up at Cambridge and found out that he had real genius for biology. I used to say there was science in the blood, but this new book of his brother's shows I was wrong.'

6

Apropos to his remark about the Comtists, one of the company. pointed out that in later life Comte recognised a science of the individual,' equivalent to what Huxley meant by pyschology. 'That,' he replied, was due to the influence of Clotilde de Vaux. You see,' he added with a kind of Sir Charles Grandison bow to my wife, 'what power your sex may have.' As Huxley was going out of the house I said to him that Father A. B. (the priest who had been present) had not expected to find himself in his company. 'No! I trust he had plenty of holy water with him,' was the reply.

Before he left we had an amusing instance of his positiveness. I reminded him that I had met him a month earlier in embarrassing circumstances. My hat had fallen into a pond, and I had asked him whether to walk home hatless or in the wet hat. I took your advice,' I said, 'as the most learned man in England on such subjects. I put on the hat, and I have had a frightful cold in the head ever since.' He replied promptly and quite seriously, You would have had pneumonia if you had kept it off.'

After he had gone we were all agreed as to the extraordinary vigour and brilliancy he had shown. Some one said, 'He is like a man who is what the Scotch call "fey." We laughed at the idea; but we naturally recalled the remark later on.

Shortly afterwards I was anxious to get Huxley's advice as to an illustration I proposed to use in a review of the Foundations of Belief, connected with the gradual growth of sensitiveness to light in sentient beings. Being away from Eastbourne I wrote to him. His reply, written on the 27th of February-just before the commencement of his last illness-has a melancholy interest now.

I am not sure [he wrote] that any information of the kind you need is extant. Among the lowest forms of life 'sensitiveness to light' is measured only by the way in which they group themselves towards or away from light, and it may signify nothing but a physical operation with which sensitiveness in the ordinary sense has nothing to do. The only clue here is in the state of the visual organ, where such exists. It can be traced down from the highest form of eyes step by step to the end of a single nerve filament surrounded by dark pigment and covered by the transparent outer skin. But whether in the last case the nerve ending is as much affected by the light (i.e. ether waves) as the nerve endings in the higher eyes are, and whether the affection of the nerve substance gives rise to a state of consciousness like that produced in us by light waves, are quite insoluble questions.

The most comprehensive discussion of the subject I can call to mind is in Tom. XII. of Milne Edwards's Leçons sur la Physiologie, and I can lend you the volume, and if you are back here before you want to use your information, I can supply you with oral commentary and diagrams ad libitum. There is not much water in the well, but you shall pump it dry with pleasure.

The first instalment of my discussion of the Foundations of Belief will be out in a day or two. I am sorry to say that my opinion of the book as anything more than a mere bit of clever polemic sinks steadily.

My wife is much better, and I have contrived to escape the pestilence yet. If I could compound for a day or two's neuralgia, I would not mind, but I abhor that long incapacity and convalescence.

Ever yours very faithfully,

T. H. HUXLEY.

The very next day he was taken ill, and after four months, in which that vigorous mind and frame struggled with illness and exhaustion, he passed away.

So ended the life of one of whom Englishmen are justly proud for the extraordinary lucidity and brilliancy with which he impressed on his generation the characteristic scientific creed of his time, as well as for much else which specialists will measure with greater accuracy than the general reader.

6

In the problems of ethics of religion, to which he gave so much attention, I have attempted to convey my own impression, which will not be shared by those who fix their attention wholly on the destructive side of his teaching, that he united two divergent tendencies. Descartes combined the philosophy of methodic doubt with the faith of a Catholic. The same certainly cannot be said of Huxley. But that an antithesis between his theoretical methods and his practical attitude did impress some of those most interested in his remarkable mind the foregoing pages have shown. I concur with those who believe that his rooted faith in ethical ideals, which he confessed himself unable to account for by the known laws of evolution, implied a latent recognition of the claims of religious mystery as more imperative and important than he could explicitly

Cosmic evolution may teach us how the good and the evil tendencies of man may have come about; but, in itself, it is incompetent to furnish any better reason why what we call good is preferable to what we call evil than we had before.'

admit on his own agnostic principles. Careful students of his writings are aware how far more he left standing of Christian faith than was popularly supposed even in his explicit theories; and this knowledge appeared more and not less significant to many of those who conversed with him.

One thing, at all events, was beyond question-that his occasional flippancy in controversy represented no levity in his way of regarding serious and sacred subjects as a whole. It was in some cases provoked by real narrowness in good people, and sometimes by what I could not but consider his own narrowness, which failed to view minor details of popular Christianity in their true proportion; and sometimes by the temptation to take controversial advantage of positions current among the orthodox which theologians themselves are likely eventually to abandon. Had he lived in the early seventeenth century he would have represented Christianity as standing or falling with the truth of the Ptolemaic system, and have depicted the theologians, who would not at once break with the Ptolemaic interpretation of Josue, as the most vivid caricatures of unreason.

Such considerations made it seem to many of those who met him more philosophical, as it certainly was more natural, not to attach the weight currently given to his attacks on incidental features of a system whose laws of organic growth he never comprehended.

Apart from these subjects one could not but learn much, even amid great divergence, and feel that divergence itself became less by mutual explanation. Had he found a logical place in his theory of knowledge for the great ethical ideals he so much reverenced in word and in practice, I cannot but think that a far greater change in his philosophy would have taken place than he ever contemplated. At all events, he had the power of intercourse, largely sympathetic, with those who could have had little in common with him, had the man been simply identical with his speculative agnosticism.

WILFRID WARD.

1896

THE QUALITY OF MERCY

WHATEVER We may think of the artistic and critical influence of Mr. Ruskin on his age, we cannot but view with admiration and reverence much of his moral teaching, and there are in his writings innumerable isolated words of wisdom which would be well printed in letters of gold wherever men and women congregate and youth is educated. Amongst these is one which could not be too often reproduced before the eyes of an indifferent, egotistic, and cynical generation. It is this: Whosoever is not actively kind is cruel.' It is an absolute truth, but one which is very little heeded.

I will not here speak of the three crystallised and applauded forms of cruelty, war, sport, and scientific experiment. I wish to speak only of what is by the latter termed lay cruelty, but which I would myself call general and scarcely conscious cruelty-the ill-treatment of all sentient creatures not human by human creatures from the apathy, egotism, and unkindness of the latter. It is to this form of cruelty that Mr. Ruskin alludes in the sentence previously quoted.

The cruelty of earlier times had its chief cause in violence; the cruelty of modern times has its chief cause in cowardice and selfishness. The character of the cruelty has altered, but its prevalence remains equally widespread and its motive is more contemptible. The modern world regards the pillory and the stocks as barbarous ; but it allows the railway signalman to be riveted to his post for eighteen consecutive hours, and sees no harm in it. The human race was then ruder, no doubt, but more generous, more violent in some ways, but more magnanimous. Remember the familiar story of the Roman who wrung the neck of the dove which took refuge in his bosom from the pursuing bird of prey, and was stoned by his fellowcitizens. In the modern world there would be no movement of indignation against such an act; gentlewomen and men see the necks wrung of the wounded birds in the shooting enclosures without the slightest emotion of pity or effort at censure.

Not long ago I spoke of this to a young and beautiful Englishwoman of the great world, and she answered, 'Yes, it is useless to attempt to move them to any feeling for animals. You can get them to do something for people, because they think it does them good

with the masses, keeps off revolution, and helps in canvassing. But for cruelty they do not care in the least.' She could not have uttered a greater truth or a more cutting satire.

There are exceptions, doubtless, but they are not numerous enough to leaven the great mass of indifferent and selfish people. Animals find but few friends. Alas! they have no votes !

There is, perhaps, one thing still more nauseating than the world's apathy, and that is its self-praise; its admiration of its own charities, so miserably insignificant besides the extravagance of its own pleasures. When we think how little is done by those who could do so much to influence even their own households to justice and tenderness, one cannot wonder that the populace is unmoved by the occasional invitation to them from a higher world to display those virtues which the rich prefer rather to inculcate than to practise.

Last year in England, in a nobleman's house, a footman beat a small dog which ran into the offices with a red-hot poker, and piled burning coals on it until it died in indescribable agony. I wrote and asked the nobleman in question if he had dismissed this monster from his service, the man having been only punished by the Bench with a slight fine; the nobleman answered me so evasively that it was easy to read between the lines and see that he had retained the footman in his service. This act on the part of the servant was an extreme case of hideous cruelty, but his employer's condonation is by no means an extreme case; it is, indeed, a very common sample of a master's indifference, of that indifference which is practically connivance. People abandon their stables to their coachmen, their dogs to their keepers; even the animals they call pets are frequently allowed to suffer from servants, or children, and are bullied, neglected, and teased with impunity.

The disgusting spectacle of dog-catching by the police is allowed to be presented in the public streets of most capitals of Europe continually, and there is none of that outburst of revolted feeling which such an offence to all humane sentiment and common decency should provoke. If such spectacles excited in the general public onethousandth part of such disgust as they would excite in any really civilised people, it would be impossible for such scenes to exist in either hemisphere to shock the sight and sense of those of more refined taste and more humane feelings.

There is an excellent association for the protection of birds, but its aims are so little in touch with its generation that it obtains only the most meagre support. Great names and patrician names are very rare upon its lists, and at its public meetings its cause has its neck at once broken by the question of sport being rigorously excluded by its chairman.

There is an institution in London which calls itself a 'home for lost dogs'; under this affecting title it appeals for funds, as though