Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
speculations, Huxley rejected the positivist's take on the philosophy of the
physical sciences and his apparently weak understanding of current scien-
tific knowledge.
By some time around 1868, Huxley seems to have realized that a more
deliberate effort to divorce himself from the Comtians was needed. His
objections of fifteen years before had been occasioned only by the amateur-
ism of Lewes' topic. Pained by Huxley's criticism of him as a mere “topic
man,” Lewes thought to mend the rift by brushing up on his zoology, but
this was not the real crux of the problem.
26
Even if the positivists had fully
comprehended what was going on in the biological field, their center of
gravity was social science, and this made them competitors. Now at the
height of his career and bearing much of the weight of the scientific cause
on his shoulders, Huxley was actively determined to drive every dilettante
from the field of battle. But he was also no less determined than the posi-
tivists to situate science in the public mind as the true engine of civilized
progress, and this made Comte's personal moral failings an issue for the
Victorian constituents he hoped to win over. Émile Littré's biography of his
mentor had filled Huxley with “a feeling of sheer disgust and contempt for
the man who could treat a noble-hearted woman who had saved his life and
his reason, as Comte treated his wife.”
27
Had his own friendships not been
at stake, Huxley undoubtedly would have also cited Lewes' adulterous rela-
tionship with George Eliot as evidence of positivism's moral depravity. Such
objections were more than just personal. If he hoped to get English society
to recognize that science embodied those ideals that had formerly clustered
around the term “providence” but were now being transferred over to “prog-
ress,” he would also need to create science in the image of English society
and to distance it form the more relaxed mores of the French.
28
Such fears were accentuated by the fact that positivism seemed to be
gaining position in the public arena. Around this time, Charles Kingsley
complained as he wrote to fellow Broad Churchman F. D. Maurice that the
“very air seems full of Comtism. Certainly the press is.”
29
“It is Positivism—
of a loose maundering kind,” he wrote concerning a book on pantheism by
the head of a Wesleyan training college in 1871, “which is really growing
among our young men. When Huxley proclaims himself a disciple of Kant
and Berkeley, they think in their hearts, then he is a retrograde dreamer—
'almost as bad as that fool of a Christian, Kingsley.' ”
30
To make matters worse, Huxley had learned while dining at George
Eliot's house with the positivist historians Frederic Harrison and Edward
Beesly that these followers of Comte measured the worth of all scientific
