Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
Your stimulation of my combative instincts is downright wicked. I will
not look at the
Fortnightly
article lest I succumb to temptation. At least not
yet. The truth is that these cursed irons of mine, that have always given
me so much trouble, will put themselves in the fire, when I am not think-
ing about them. There are three or four already.
9
Like addicts of other sorts, Huxley was on and off this wagon, but he was
forever cognizant of the dangers of any merely militant approach to the
campaign for science. “Battles, like hypotheses, are not to be multiplied
beyond necessity,” he wrote to the Oxford scientist Ray Lankester, whom he
thought needed some “stirring down.”
10
And “necessity” for Huxley meant
the cause of science.
Even when he did press the attack for the sake of the emerging evo-
lutionary paradigm, this was something done for calculated reasons—with
an eye on the larger scientific cause. In one piece of correspondence, we
find him offering to fight some public battle over evolution in Darwin's
stead so that the shedding of blood would not soil the sainted ethos of the
elder scientist. He warned Darwin that, while it would be a small matter for
Huxley himself to say “a savage thing,” were this great scientist to behave in
an ungentlemanly fashion, it would not likely be forgotten.
11
Bare-knuckled
brawling had its place, of course, but diplomacy was often more effective
than bloodletting. After reviewing some of the work of the German biolo-
gist Ernst Haeckel, a radical materialist and vocal proponent of Darwin's
work, Huxley cautioned that it would perhaps not be wise to characterize
God as mere “gas.”
With respect to the polemic
excursus
, of course, I chuckle over them most
sympathetically, and then say how naughty they are! I have done too
much of the same sort of thing not to sympathize entirely with you; and I
am much inclined to think that it is a good thing for a man, once at any
rate in his life, to perform a public war-dance against all sorts of humbug
and imposture.
But having satisfied one's love of freedom in this way, perhaps the
sooner the war-paint is off the better. It has no virtue except as a sign
of one's own frame of mind and determination, and when that is once
known, is little better than a distraction.
12
The higher “virtue” that Huxley had in mind was restraint. His own
views were no less radical than Haeckel's, but his abiding desire to see sci-
ence win out required a measured response to opponents. What will strike
