Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
Nothing but what is absolutely practical will go down in England. A man
of science may earn great distinction, but not bread. He will get invi-
tations to all sorts of dinners and conversaziones, but not enough for
income to pay his cab fare. A man of science in these times is like an Esau
who sells his birthright for a mess of pottage.
17
But the same determination that kept him from succumbing to despair
also inspired the lifelong vigilance of his efforts to reconstruct English soci-
ety in the image of science. Not content with the personal success he finally
achieved by his appointment to the Royal School of Mines in 1854, Hux-
ley labored without ceasing to secure the creation of scientific institutions
that could control their own destiny, that would neither play handmaid to
noblemen and clergy, nor sign on as the technological underlings of the
emerging industrial class.
c
atholicism
minus
c
hRistianity
The English emphasis on “what is absolutely practical” brings us closer to
the kind of threat Huxley saw in positivism. In 1851 he would have blamed
this attitude on an old guard that was intellectually removed from science
and still drew what inspiration they had for it from the surviving vestiges
of a Baconian instrumentalism. But to emphasize again a point made by
Joseph Ben-David, the tendency to identify science with its real-world appli-
cations is a disposition that arises from scientism in all its forms.
18
The
enlarged value that scientism attributes to the scientific enterprise typically
arises from faith in its possibilities of application, and this remained true for
positivists as much as for those who had once found inspiration in Bacon's
New Atlantis
. Comte had preached a form of scientism that coincided with
the general interests of the new scientific professionals, but its sociologi-
cal blueprint threatened to perpetuate science's servitude. Indeed, in one
respect the social order envisioned in positivism was a greater threat to
science's prospects than the old clerical and aristocratic order. The classical
model of education that was still held in place by England's elites at least did
not claim to have the authority of science at its back. Positivism did. Comte
regarded himself as a scientific reader and interpreter of the text of human
evolution (in a broadly historical sense), and he claimed that the science of
sociology he was ushering in would soon order (and therefore regulate) all
knowledge. Sociology was to become the science of sciences, and therefore,
in Huxley's view, a generalized science poised to devour its own children.
