“In the eighth century B.C., in the heart of a world of idolatrous polytheists, the Hebrew prophets put forth a conception of religion which appears to me to be as wonderful an inspiration of genius as the art of Pheidias or the science of Aristotle.  ’And what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?’ If any so-called religion takes away from this great saying of Micah, I think it wantonly mutilates, while if it adds thereto, I think it obscures, the perfect ideal of religion.”

CHAPTER XVI

ETHICS OF THE COSMOS

Conduct and Metaphysics—­Conventional and Critical Minds—­Good and Evil—­Huxley’s Last Appearance at Oxford—­The Ethical Process and the Cosmic Process—­Man’s Intervention—­The Cosmic Process Evil—­Ancient Reconciliations—­Modern Acceptance of the Difficulties—­Criticism of Huxley’s Pessimism—­Man and his Ethical Aspirations Part of the Cosmos.

We have seen that Huxley refused to acquiesce in the current orthodox doctrine that our systems of morality rested on a special revelation, miraculous in its origin, and vouched for by the recorded miracles of its Founder, or by those entrusted by the Founder with miraculous power.  He supported the view that, historically and actually, there is no necessary connection between religion and morality.  The one is an attempt, in his opinion always unsuccessful, to lift the veil from the unseen, to know the unknowable; the other is simply the code that social man, through the ages, has elaborated for his own guidance, and proved by his own experience.  So far as the conduct of life goes, the morality of one who accepts the agnostic position with regard to revelation and the unseen universe differs in no respect from the code taken under the protection of the modern forms of religion.  As John Morley, in his Essay on Voltaire wrote of such a person: 

“There are new solutions for him, if the old have fallen dumb.  If he no longer believe death to be a stroke from the sword of God’s justice, but the leaden footfall of an inflexible law of matter, the humility of his awe is deepened, and the tenderness of his pity made holier, that creatures who can love so much should have their days so shut round with a wall of darkness.  The purifying anguish of remorse will be stronger, not weaker, when he has trained himself to look upon every wrong in thought, every duty omitted from act, each infringement of the inner spiritual law which humanity is constantly perfecting for its own guidance and advantage, less as a breach of the decrees of an unseen tribunal than as an ungrateful infection weakening and corrupting the future of his brothers.”

But there are wider questions than the immediate problems of conduct.  A certain type of mind finds it almost impossible not to attempt ethical judgments on the