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Huxley's active displays against positivism were always prompted by the
efforts of its leaders to link their views with his, and it is this perceived
ideological kinship that also makes these clashes so illuminating. Comte's
philosophy was, for Huxley, a scientific heresy, and as writers such as Lester
Kurtz and Kai Erickson have shown, the institutional attraction of cam-
paigns launched against internal deviance of this kind lies in their abil-
ity to achieve subtle differentiations. 23 A clash of similar worldviews is an
opportunity for ideological clarification, and this makes Huxley's efforts
to symbolically divorce science from positivism particularly illuminating.
These attacks, we might say, provide an inverted reflection of evolutionism.
What this will also show is that evolutionism represents a return to the
more indigenous historical consciousness of the Protestant movement that
Bacon had already mapped onto science. Of course it was this same Baco-
nian ideology that Huxley was combating on another front, in his many
attacks on the clergy and the educational structure they upheld. It was this
traditional proto-scientism that had kept this establishment in place as sci-
ence's overseer, but its deep roots in the British consciousness also made it a
rhetorical resource that Huxley could ill afford to pass over. This meant that
what he would soon be calling agnosticism was in fact a more indigenous
version of positivism that proposed, in contrast with that of Saint-Simon
and Comte, a historical vision that had special appeal for England's pre-
dominantly Protestant culture.
While it would be fair to say that the controversy over positivism pit-
ted one recondite circle of intellectuals against another, the recognizable
breadth of public interest in this French movement certainly enlarged the
stakes for Huxley. In the introduction to his history of English positivism,
The Religion of Humanity , T. R. Wright acknowledges that his project became
a “massive undertaking” once he discovered that “nearly all the major Brit-
ish thinkers of the second half of the nineteenth century” had studied
Comte. But in spite of the breadth of this fashionable interest, England
failed to sustain a developed positivist movement. 24 If this failure reflected
any effort of active opposition, Huxley certainly would have been the figure
blamed by positivists. Having delved into Comte's work in the early 1850s
after discovering John Stuart Mill's discussions of Comte's philosophy in
his Logic , he had come away with an unfavorable impression. The “mine of
wisdom” he had been promised by his friend Mr. Henfry, he would later
say, turned up “veins of ore few and far between, and the rock so apt to run
to mud, that one incurred the risk of being intellectually smothered in the
work ing.” 25 Although he did confess some interest in Comte's sociological
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