years the candle was lighted beside his bed, and for a couple
of hours after midnight he would devour works on philosophy--English,
German, and French, and occasionally Latin. To a mind at once
constructive and intensely critical of unsound construction he added a
quality possessed by few professed philosophers--a large knowledge of
the workings of life, of the human thinking machine, in addition
to various other branches of physical science. As he put it, the
laboratory is the forecourt to the temple of philosophy. For the
method of the laboratory is but the strict application of the one
sound and fruitful mode of reasoning--the method of verification by
experiment. Evidence must be tested before being trusted. The first
duty of such a method is to question in order to find good reason;
Goethe's "taetige Skepsis," a scepticism or questioning which seeks to
overcome itself by finding good standing-ground beyond. Authority as
such is nothing till verified anew. The creeds of ancient sages, the
dogmas of more modern date, must equally bear the light of widening
knowledge and the tests that prove the gold or clay of their
foundations, the stability of the successive steps by which they
proceed.

In all this reading Huxley found nothing to shake what he had learnt
long before from Hamilton--the limits set to human knowledge and
the impossibility of attaining to the ultimate reality behind the
phenomena presented to our cognition. The problems of philosophy, set
forth with unsurpassed clearness for all who will read in our great
English writers, were not solved by soaring into intellectual mists.
To those who declared they had attained this ultimate knowledge by
their own inner light or through an alleged revelation in historical
experience, the question remained to be put: How do you verify your
assertion? Is the historical evidence on which you build trustworthy?
And if in certain departments this evidence is clearly untenable,
what guarantee have you that in other departments evidence of similar
character is tenable? The fine-spun abstractions of the Platonists
and their kin, unchecked by a natural science which had not yet the
appliances necessary for its growth; the orthodoxies of the various
churches, so singularly differentiated in the course of development
from the simplicity of their nominal founder--these were based upon
assumptions for which the seeker after reasoned evidence could find no
valid support. Ten year