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making a positivist argument. But on the eve of this lecture—at least as he
sets the scene in the text of that speech—Huxley ran across a newspaper
report on a recent address by William Thomson, the archbishop of York,
“On the Limits of Physical Inquiry.” Recognizing this as a likely attack on
his own naturalistic stance, he was even more dismayed to discover that the
distinguished cleric had identified Auguste Comte as the “founder” of this
“New Philosophy.” Huxley saw fit, as an aside to the main subject of the
next day's lecture, to challenge this part of the archbishop's address.
Now, so far as I am concerned, the most reverend prelate might dialecti-
cally hew M. Comte in pieces, as a modern Agag, and I should not attempt
to stay his hand. In so far as my study of what specially characterises the
Positive Philosophy has led me, I find therein little or nothing of any sci-
entific value, and a great deal which is as thoroughly antagonistic to the
very essence of science as anything in ultramontane Catholicism. In fact,
M. Comte's philosophy, in practice, might be compendiously described as
Catholicism minus Christianity. 39
It is easy to imagine Huxley's motive for interjecting this attack into a
speech that was mainly intended to advance a materialistic assault on the
last remnants of vitalism in natural philosophy. The physicalism that he
himself was preaching was already widely associated with positivism, as the
archbishop had suggested, and so to let those comments stand would have
been to concede such an alliance. Positivism, of course, was not “thoroughly
antagonistic to the very essence of science,” in the methodological sense in
which Huxley would elsewhere define that essence. It was hostile only to
the rival social philosophy that Huxley regarded as better disposed than
Comte's “ultramontane Catholicism” to dictate what scientists could and
could not do at the parish level.
The good archbishop had made no apparent mention of these applied
aspects of positive social philosophy nor of any of its other notorious pecu-
liarities; his apparent purpose had merely been to discuss the general meta-
physical skepticism of the emerging scientific culture, a skepticism that just
happened to have its most familiar representation in the popular positivism
of his day. His had been no more than factual observations, with which
Huxley should have had little cause to disagree. Huxley's scientific natural-
ism, after all, was virtually indistinguishable from the epistemology of the
positivists, and thus, superficially at least, his response was a bit of a red
herring. But by drawing the attention of his Scottish Presbyterian audience
to those papist features of positivism it was sure to find repellant, he also
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