“... I must confess that what interests me most about Priestley’s materialism, is the evidence that he saw dimly the seed of destruction which such materialism carries within its own bosom. In the course of his reading for his ‘History of Discoveries relating to Vision, Light, and Colours,’ he had come upon the speculations of Boscovich and Michell, and had been led to admit the sufficiently obvious truth that our knowledge of matter is a knowledge of its properties; and that of its substance--if it have a substance--we know nothing. And this led to the further admission that, so far as we can know, there may be no difference between the substance of matter and the substance of spirit (‘Disquisitions, p. 16’). A step farther would have shown Priestley that his materialism was, essentially, very little different from the Idealism of his contemporary, the Bishop of Cloyne.” Perhaps William James may have had Huxley or his type in mind when he wrote his famous passage about learning “to stand this universe.” Yet I suspect that Huxley’s universe was more simple and benevolent, more naïvely conceived than was that of James. Huxley was to the end a rationalist, and lived and worked in a period when Nature was thought to be essentially reasonable. Man need only learn the laws of nature and obey them to become wise and happy and good. The aim of education was to acquaint the student with the laws of nature. “Well, what I mean by Education is learning the rules of this mighty game. In other words, education is the instruction of the intellect in the laws of Nature, under which name I include not merely things and their forces, but men and their ways; and the fashioning of the affections and of the will into an earnest and loving desire to move in harmony with those laws. For me, education means neither more nor less than this.... “Suppose it were perfectly certain that the life and fortune of every one of us would, one day or other, depend upon his winning or losing a game of chess. Don’t you think that we should all consider it to be a primary duty to learn at least the names and the moves of the pieces; to have a notion of a gambit, and a keen eye for all the means of giving and getting out of check?