more exact, and the
influence of supernatural doctrine on conduct the greater, the
further we go back in time and the lower the stage of
civilisation submitted to investigation. Historically, indeed,
there would seem to be an inverse relation between supernatural
and natural knowledge. As the latter has widened, gained in
precision and trustworthiness, so has the former shrunk, grown
vague and questionable; as the one has more and more filled the
sphere of action, so has the other retreated into the region of
meditation, or vanished behind the screen of mere verbal
recognition. Whether this difference of the fortunes of
Naturalism and Supernaturalism is an indication of the progress,
or of the regress of humanity, of a fall from or an advance
towards the higher life, is a matter of opinion. The point to
which I wish to direct attention is that the difference exists
and is making itself felt. Men are growing seriously alive to the
fact that the historical evolution of humanity, which is
generally, and I venture to think, not unreasonably, regarded as
progress, has been and is being accompanied by a co-ordinate
elimination of the supernatural from its originally large
occupation of men's thought."

Every stage in this long process, every new attempt to place physical
phenomena in a chain of direct causation has been denounced as
dangerous and degrading materialism, and in this sense Huxley was not
only an adherent but one of the foremost champions of materialism. As
everyone knows, some of the greatest advances in this process of
co-ordinating physical phenomena were made during Huxley's life; and
his vigorous onslaughts on those who tried to thwart all attempts at
material explanations in favour of unknown agencies made him specially
open to abusive criticism. The battle was almost invariably between
those who had not special knowledge and those in possession of it, and
it occurred in practically the whole field of science, but
particularly in the biological sciences. A single example will serve
to shew what is meant by materialism in this sense and the attitude of
Huxley to it. The study of the human mind naturally has attracted the
attention of thinkers almost since the beginning of philosophy, but
until this century, with a few crude exceptions, it has been conducted
entirely apart from anatomy and physiology. Advances