he 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