T.H. Huxley, though he spoke as a man of science, gave a priestly cadence to his concluding words on ‘Evolution and Ethics’ in 1893: ‘We are grown men, and must play the man “strong in will/ To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield,” cherishing the good that falls in our way, and bearing the evil, in and around us, with stout hearts set on diminishing it.’ The moral sensibility and the language, quoting the late poet laureate, Tennyson, and alluding self-appreciatively to the ‘stout-hearted’ Englishman, belonged to a shared way of life and not especially to the occupation of science. His lecture was much discussed. What, then, of the relation between science and such injunctions to the will?

In this chapter, I address this question, and I do so by examining closely a key text and the controversy which it aroused.