By 1870 Carlyle's lesson was already well started on its course from paradox to platitude. The most important single influence in that course had been the growth of Natural Science. It was, for instance, in 1870 that Huxley's _Lay Sermons_ were collected and published. People who could not in 1850 understand Carlyle's distinction between the Delusive and the Eeal, could not help understanding Huxley's comparison of life and death to a game of chess with an unseen opponent who never makes a mistake.[92] And Huxley's impersonal Science seemed a more present aid in the voyage round Cape Horn than Carlyle's personal and impossible Hero. [92] _Lay Sermont_, p. 31, 'A Liberal Education' (1868). But the invention of a competitive Civil Service, when it had once been made and adopted, dropped from the region of severe and difficult thought in which it originated, and took its place in our habitual political psychology. We now half-consciously conceive of the Civil Service as an unchanging fact whose good and bad points are to be taken or left as a whole. Open competition has by the same process become a principle, conceived of as applying to those cases to which it has been in fact applied, and to no others. What is therefore for the moment most needed, if we are to think fruitfully on the subject, is that we should in our own minds break up this fact, and return to the world of infinite possible variations. We must think of the expedient of competition itself as varying in a thousand different directions, and shading by imperceptible gradations into other methods of appointment; and of the posts offered for competition as differing each from all the rest, as overlapping those posts for which competition in some form is suitable though it has not yet been tried, and as touching, at the marginal point on their curve, those posts for which competition is unsuitable.