ut because his experience teaches him that whenever he chooses
to bring these convictions into contact with their primary source,
Nature--whenever he thinks fit to test them by appealing to experiment
and to observation--Nature will confirm them. The man of science has
learned to believe in justification, not by faith, but by verification.

Thus, without for a moment pretending to despise the practical results
of the improvement of natural knowledge, and its beneficial influence
on material civilization, it must, I think, be admitted that the great
ideas, some of which I have indicated, and the ethical spirit which
I have endeavoured to sketch, in the few moments which remained at my
disposal, constitute the real and permanent significance of natural
knowledge.

If these ideas be destined, as I believe they are, to be more and more
firmly established as the world grows older; if that spirit be fated, as
I believe it is, to extend itself into all departments of human thought,
and to become co-extensive with the range of knowledge; if, as our race
approaches its maturity, it discovers, as I believe it will, that there
is but one kind of knowledge and but one method of acquiring it; then
we, who are still children, may justly feel it our highest duty to
recognise the advisableness of improving natural knowledge, and so to
aid ourselves and our successors in their course towards the noble goal
which lies before mankind.

[Footnote 1: A Lay Sermon delivered in St. Martin's Hall on Sunday,
January 7th, 1866, and subsequently published in the 'Fortnightly
Review'.]

[Footnote 2: Need it be said that this is Tennyson's English for Homer's
Greek?]

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Natural Knowledge, by Thomas H. Huxley

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