The type strongly in contrast with the foregoing is found in persons of a more strenuous, perhaps more admirable but less agreeable character. The savour of acerbity may be a natural attribute of the critical character, and it is certainly not lessened where moral philosophy is the subject-matter of the criticism. The continual search after solutions of problems that may be insoluble at least makes the seekers excellent judges of wrong solutions. Like Luther and Loyola and Kant, they may be able to satisfy themselves, or, like Huxley, they may remain in doubt, but in either case they are excellent critics of the solutions of others. They are the firebrands of faith or of negation; they are possessed by an intellectual fury that will not let them cease from propagandising. They must go through the world as missionaries; and the missionary spirit is dual, one side zealous to proclaim the new, the other equally zealous to denounce the old. But theirs is the great work, "to burn old falsehood bare," to tear away the incrustations of time which people have come to accept as the thing itself, and in their track new and lively truth springs up, as fresh green follows the devastations of fire.
To most of us it seems of sufficient importance and of sufficient difficulty to make our decisions in the little eddies of good and evil that form as the world-stream breaks round our individual lives. Huxley strove to interpret the world-stream itself, to translate its movements into the ethical language of man. As knowledge of the forces and movements of the Cosmos has increased so has our general conception been intensified, our conception of it as a wondrous display of power and grandeur and superhuman fixity of order. But are the forces of the Cosmos good or evil? Are we, and the Cosmos of which we are a part, the sport of changeable and capricious deities, the pawns in a game of the gods, as some of the Greeks held; or of a power drunkenly malicious, as Heine once cynically suggested; or a battle-ground for a force of good and a force of evil as in so many Eastern religions? Are we dominated by pure evil, as some dark creeds have held, or by pure good, as the religion of the Western world teaches? And if we are dominated by pure evil, whence come good and the idea of good, or, if by pure good, whence evil and the idea of evil?