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drew attention away from what he shared with Comte's disciples. By attend-
ing only to the “Catholic” residues of positivism while remaining silent on
his more essential agreement with its core epistemological stance, Huxley
could maintain at least the appearance that his own view of the limits of
knowledge did not place him in the same ideological enclosure.
The “Catholicism
minus
Christianity” charge was particularly effective,
“a
mot
,” as Sydney Eisen has described it, “which would forever haunt the
English positivists.”
40
The February 1869 publication of Huxley's speech in
the
Fortnightly Review
put the periodical into seven editions, though prob-
ably because of the radical materialistic stance the speech gave voice to
rather than because of these comments about positivism.
41
Nevertheless,
its wide distribution publicized Huxley's opposition to Comte's philosophy.
This was a hard knock for a group that saw itself as the new voice of science.
Edward Beesly, complaining that positivism was already “struggling against
heavy odds to obtain a fair hearing,” bemoaned the fact that this criticism
came from a man of such high scientific standing. “From almost everyone
else this would not matter. But from a man of your eminence and known
emancipation it amounts to something like putting Comte on the
Index
Expurgatorius
.”
42
Richard Congreve, the Oxford don recently turned positivist high
priest, rang in with a similar protest. In an article-length response in the
Fortnightly Review
, he complained that Huxley's comments “are hardly wor-
thy of their place, and would have come better from one of our débonnaire
literary oracles than from a high scientific authority on whom rests a certain
responsibility.” Congreve offered various speculations that might account
for Huxley's dismissive attitude, including the charge that he simply had not
read Comte and that the Edinburgh barb was nothing more than “an impa-
tient utterance based on a wholly imperfect and insufficient acquaintance
with the subject of which Mr. Huxley is speaking.”
43
This was an unwise
accusation to raise against a voracious reader like Huxley, who quickly put
it to rest in a published response heavily lathered with long quotations from
Comte in the original French.
44
But Congreve was probably closer to the truth when he called Hux-
ley's response “the judgment of a biologist penetrated with the importance
of his own subject, and full of respect for the preliminary sciences, but
bounding his horizon with his own science; either not allowing that there
are higher sciences, or not caring for them.”
45
This touched the sore spot.
If sociology was indeed a science, it would be “higher” than biology, a sci-
ence that, by rendering a comprehensive understanding of human nature,
