cs were
notoriously materialists and pantheists of the most extreme
character; and while no strict Stoic believed in the eternal
duration of the individual soul, some even denied its persistence
after death. Yet it is equally certain, that, of all gentile
philosophies, Stoicism exhibits the highest ethical development,
is animated by the most religious spirit, and has exerted the
profoundest influence upon the moral and religious development
not merely of the best men among the Romans, but among the
moderns down to our own day."

He held the view now generally taken by students of the history of
man, that standards of conduct and religious beliefs arose in separate
ways and developed independently, and that it was only comparatively
recently that "religion took morality under its protection." But he
met the argument in a still more direct fashion by rejecting entirely
the possibility or advisability of founding any system of ethics upon
a false basis.

"It is very clear to me," he wrote, "that, as Beelzebub is not
to be cast out by Beelzebub, so morality is not to be established
by immorality. It is, we are told, the special peculiarity of the
devil that he was a liar from the beginning. If we set out in
life with pretending to know that which we do not know; with
professing to accept for proof evidence which we are well aware
is inadequate; with wilfully shutting our eyes and our ears to
facts which militate against this or that comfortable hypothesis;
we are assuredly doing our best to deserve the same character."

Freedom of thought meant for Huxley all that is best in liberalism
applied to life. In an essay on Joseph Priestley, he described the
condition of affairs in England last century, when scientific
investigation and all forms of independent thinking laboured under the
most heavy restrictions that could be imposed by dominant
ecclesiastical and civil prejudice. He pointed out the astounding
changes between these times and the times of to-day.

"If we ask," he wrote, "what is the deeper meaning of all these
vast changes, there can be but one reply. They mean that reason
has asserted and exercised her primacy over all the provinces of
human activity; that ecclesiastical authority has been relegated
to its proper place; that the good of the governed has been
finally recognised as the end of