I have just come across a passage from Huxley’s famous _Romanes Lecture_, read thirty years ago and long since forgotten; and which has brought home to me all our elusive Proteus has been doing in the domain of ethics; moreover the share of Intelligence in confirming those changes. Huxley is pointing out a fact which he finds disconcerting, namely, “that ethical nature, while born of cosmic nature, is necessarily at enmity with its parent.” The allusion to the harmony reigning in Victorian families may make one smile, like some well-bred Du Maurier illustration. But how those words bring back what some of us are old enough to have suffered in days when Free Thought drew a terrifying line between religious dogmas and moral ones, clinging to these to steady itself after jettisoning the others! One’s youthful deistic anguish (as cruel, perhaps, as any believer’s sense of God’s forsaking him) at discarding God for insufficient morality, was merely transferred to one’s terms with Huxley’s ogre Cosmos, devouring the moral instincts itself had begotten. Occupied as my studies then were with art-history, I can remember wrestling with the horrid inconsistency of the art of Michael Angelo and Rafael having arisen in a civilization described by Taine as partaking of the brothel and the cut-throat’s den. And I remember the heavenly relief of hitting on the notion that, since such art is not born in a day, it must have been begotten and incubated during the Franciscan Age, immune from all Borgian infections. Of course, the generation immediately younger than mine was taught by Nietzsche that Michael Angelo’s greatness was, on the contrary, due to presiding Renaissance villainy; but that pseudo-Nietzschian generation is, in its turn, superannuated, and the cult of _immoralism_ along with it. Not only because paradoxes do not bear repetition, but for another reason which that quotation from Huxley has made me realize. Namely, that we have left off thinking of art as either moral or immoral, simply because morality no longer holds the same place in our thoughts as, say, in those of Ruskin, George Eliot, or, as that quotation shows, even in those of Huxley. Not the same (if one may say so, _ubiquitous_) place; a place more clearly defined, but only the more important, ever since Intelligence, ferreting about among _Golden Boughs_, _Religion of the Semites_, and similar books, has quietly stripped from our moral valuations that half-supernatural, half-æsthetic halo which is but the shrunken religious involucrum wherein they came into the world. The “problem of evil” has already become the problem not of its toleration by God, but of its diminution by Man. _That_ is the great change we are still witnessing; a change, I cannot but think, greater than any brought about by the material applications of science, and implying a deliverance from individual suffering not less than that we owe to Pasteur and to Lister.