Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
Notably, it was during his bitter struggle to find scientific employment
that Huxley first became intimate with England's leading positivists and
first recognized the threat that lay in certain tendencies of their thought. He
was drawn into this circle by Herbert Spencer and the physician turned rad-
ical publisher, John Chapman, who was scouting out talent for the We stmin -
ster Review . Huxley was quite willing to enlist his gift for letters, at a return
of nearly a guinea per page, by writing reviews that would aid Chapman's
campaign to “sap and undermine” the reigning orthodoxy, but he quickly
came to blows with G. H. Lewes, whose topic promoting Comte's philoso-
phy he smashed for its many scientific errors. 19 Lewes, a playwright, actor,
and journalist then on the verge of eloping with Chapman's close associate,
Mary Ann Evans (George Eliot), shared Huxley's zeal for popularizing sci-
ence and for asserting its authority above all other enterprises. What he
could not appreciate was Huxley's sensitivity to the ways in which public
conceptions of science also tended to shape the fate of scientific practice.
Like other English followers of Comte, Lewes was an amateur interested
in science largely as a weapon in the arsenal of political radicalism. Huxley
was certainly sympathetic to such uses of scientific authority, but not if they
threatened to compromise the interests of the scientific professionals he was
sworn to defend. His ambition was to make the voice of scientism the voice
of the natural scientist and to do this by his own example and on his own
terms, as a scientific man of letters. Moving in the same elite literary circles
as people like Spencer, Eliot, Lewes, and Chapman was attractive to him
because these associations gave science an aura of the avant-garde, but this
was a means for the advancement of science, not an end. 20
In one sense, the English positivists were Huxley's peer group. In spite
of some very public squabbles, he always remained at home with them in
society. They were, after all, fellow despisers of the established interests that
had once locked him out, London's radical young Turks who imbibed simi-
lar expectant dreams of a new world and a new religion soon to arise above
the rubble of a crumbling Anglican edifice. But Huxley always remained
noncommittal and aloof. In part this may be put down to his natively adver-
sarial bent of mind, one sometimes tempted, as George Eliot described it,
“to prefer paradox and antagonism to the truth” in spite of its “conscious and
ultimate” scientific aims. 21 Huxley would have accounted for this as a matter
of personal devotion to Goethe's principle of active doubt, “ Thätige skep-
sis .” 22 Nothing was immune, not even the doctrine of evolution with which
he was destined to be so closely linked in posterity, and so it is not difficult
to comprehend his cautious disdain for the positivist ideology.
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