There is an intellectual cleanness, something downright and honest about the scientific pursuit of knowledge, and this uncompromising mental integrity characterizes everything that Huxley said and did. There is nothing shifty in a mind trained as his was. His is like a cool north breeze on one of those clear summer days that sometimes follow a period of sultriness, fog and rain. If things are a little too sharply outlined, they are at least recognized for what they are. No evasive mistiness obscures the landscape. To Huxley the foundation of morality is to give up pretending to believe that for which there is no evidence. He held that the lowest depths to which the human race could fall--after knowing what science now reveals of nature--would be to go back and deceive itself with comforting fictions. You will remember his correspondence with Kingsley when death had entered his home. The grief-stricken Huxley refused the consolations of a faith in which he could not whole-heartedly believe. Like Socrates and Montaigne and many educated men today, Huxley was candidly agnostic with respect to matters which lie beyond the radius of human knowledge. Huxley was a determinist, but it is doubtful if he was a materialist. At least he held to a materialism which in one sense might be reconciled with a form of idealism. In the address in honor of Joseph Priestley he said, “Without containing much that will be new to the readers or Hobbs, Spinoza, Collins, Hume, and Hartley, and indeed, while making no pretensions to originality, Priestley’s ‘Disquisitions relating to Matter and Spirit,’ and his ‘Doctrine of Philosophical Necessity Illustrated,’ are among the most powerful, clear, and unflinching expositions of materialism and necessarianism which exist in the English language, and are still well worth reading. “Priestley denied the freedom of the will in the sense of its self-determination; he denied the existence of a soul distinct from the body; and as a natural consequence, he denied the natural immortality of man. “In relation to these matters English opinion a century ago was very much what it is now. “A man may be a necessarian without incurring graver reproach than that implied in being called a gloomy fanatic, necessarianism, though very shocking, having a note of Calvinistic orthodoxy; but, if a man is a materialist; or, if good authorities say he is and must be so, in spite of his assertion to the contrary; or, if he acknowledge himself unable to see good reasons for believing in the natural immortality of man, respectable folks look upon him as an unsafe neighbour of a cashbox, as an actual or potential sensualist, the more virtuous in outward seeming, the more certainly loaded with secret ‘grave personal sins.’