f that may come to all, still fewer
deserve some of the simpler and more common joys of life. The
conception that was implicit in the disciplines of the older
philosophies is still open to the philosophy of evolution. Behind it,
as behind the "self-hypnotised catalepsy of the devotee of Brahma,"
the Buddhist aspirations to Nirvana, the _apatheia_ of the Stoics,
there may lie a recognition of the worthlessness of the individual: an
equable acceptation of one's self as part of a process: a triumph of
intelligence over selfishness. Finally, behind the sharp division made
between man and the Cosmos, there still lurks one of the oldest and
most enduring fallacies of the world, a fallacy that Huxley himself
spent a great part of his intellectual life in discovering and
routing. The fallacy is the conception of the Cosmos as something
separate and apart from man, as something through which he, however
briefly, passes. Thus Omar sang:

"Myself, when young, did eagerly frequent
Doctor and saint, and heard great argument
About it and about: but evermore
Came out by the same door where in I went.

"With them the seed of wisdom did I sow,
And with mine own hand wrought to make it grow;
And this was all the Harvest that I reaped--
'I came like Water, and like Wind I go.'

"Into this Universe, and _Why_ not knowing
Nor _Whence_, like water willy-nilly flowing;
And out of it, like Wind along the Waste
I know not _Whither_, willy-nilly blowing."

But, the more profoundly does the conception of evolution lay hold of
human thought, the more inevitable it becomes to recognise that man
and all that is best in man--his aspirations, ideas, virtues, and
practical and abstract justice and goodness--are just as much the
product of the cosmic process and part of the Cosmos as the most
sinister results of the struggle for existence.

CHAPTER XVII

CLOSING DAYS AND SUMMARY

Huxley's Life in London--Decennial
Periods--Ill-health--Retirement to Eastbourne--Death--Personal
Appearance--Methods of Work--Personal Characteristics--An
Inspirer of Others--His Influence in Science--A Naturalist by
Vocation--His Aspirations.

Huxley's life followed the quiet and even tenor of that of a
professional man of science and letters. The great adventure in it was
his youthful voyage on the _Rattlesnake_. That over, and his choice
made in favour of science as against