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account for the emergence of evolutionism as a main feature of Huxley's
rhetorical career. The adaptive pressures that would inspire positivism's
transformation into evolutionism, in other words, were tied up with his per-
ception of the kind of social patronage that was most likely to advance the
scientific cause. French positivism might have boosted science's public pres-
tige by creating the world in its image, but to create the world in the image
of the natural sciences more specifically, as Huxleyan evolutionism would do,
would go much further toward securing the position of the natural sciences
in this emerging social order.
It will become apparent, once we look more closely at this controversy,
that Huxley attacked positivism by exposing its displaced religious mean-
ings. He charged that positivism lacked scientific substance, that it was, as
he famously said, merely “Catholicism minus Christianity.” 1 This signaled
his awareness of the very thing I argued in the last chapter—that a form of
the Christian historical consciousness persisted in the French movement.
But could Huxley escape similar enticements? If we are right to suppose
that these religious residues signified an inescapable need to displace sacred
narratives into secular histories, we should expect the same from Huxley.
Indeed, what we will find is that Huxley's public opposition to positivism
proves this rule. What we find him creating, even as he purported to expose
the unscientific character of classical positivism, was merely a Protestant-
ized displacement that was better adapted to his English audiences. Hux-
ley would discredit positivism by saying that it was instead the “agnostic”
thinker whose approach to inquiry represented “the essence of science,” but
a closer inspection will show that agnosticism was merely positivism under
a different heading and that this concept was likewise shaped by narrative
displacement. 2 If Comte's philosophy was “Catholicism minus Christian-
ity,” Huxley's agnosticism, we might say, was “Protestantism minus Christi-
anity.” Like his Continental forebears, Huxley continued to treat science as
history's apocalypse. He too claimed that modern science was the end and
meaning of history, but he adapted this claim to fit a spiritualized empiri-
cism already deeply worked into England's cultural soil. Since an influential
Baconian rhetoric had already drawn empiricism into alliance with English
Protestantism by regarding the reading of natural facts as a basis for social
and religious authority analogous to revelation, the idea of agnosticism
already lurked within this culture's religious consciousness—even before
Huxley coined this term. English followers of science were already accus-
tomed to regarding the limits to knowledge honored by true science as anal-
ogous to the religious limits imposed by the ideal of sola scriptura , and this
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