Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
encompassed even the human world. Comte, of course, would have rejected
Huxley's supposition that the social sciences were destined to be subsumed
within the natural sciences since he believed that each stage in the growth of
science was distinct from preceding ones and that the methods of the social
sciences were therefore destined to be qualitatively different from those of
their natural-scientific forebears. But in the aftermath of Comte's death, as
Ernst Cassirer has noted, many of his disciples had fallen back into the kind
of reductionism that we see in Huxley, and this made Huxley a more sym-
pathetic figure.
48
In the end, it was only Huxley's zeal for the professional
fortunes of the natural sciences that stood between him and this group.
Even in his retirement, the positivists were still trying to call him out
on this count, and he even managed to acknowledge his agreement with
the movement's most fundamental premises as he opened his “Apologetic
Irenicon” of 1889. But a writer as clever as Huxley could easily diffuse the
significance of such a concession. He did this from the beginning of the
essay simply through the distraction of sarcasm. “I hasten to stretch forth
my hand for the olive-branch which my courteous opponent holds out,” he
asserted, referring to the positivist leader Frederic Harrison, “and I assure
him of my readiness to 'kiss and be friends,' at least in that symbolic fashion
which is alone possible to male Britons.” This mocking agreement set the
stage for an essay that buried whatever peace it proposed to make in calling
itself an irenicon beneath a strident scientific apologetic. The terms of peace
offered by Harrison demanded an untenable “cession of territory” that Hux-
ley “considered to form part of the general domain of scientific thought.”
What positivists regarded as the realm of natural science was in fact “noth-
ing but a sort of Hinterland to the settlement founded by Auguste Comte.”
49
Once having brought Comte back into the forefront, Huxley could go back
to his old tricks, accentuating the Catholic trappings of the movement by
playing up its “resemblance to the Papistical model,” which had worked to
such great effect for him two decades before. Huxley would miss no oppor-
tunity to draw this connection. What he gives with one hand as praise for
Harrison's “missionary zeal” he takes back with language that simultane-
ously draws attention to the movement's religious undercurrents. Ignoring
Harrison's assurances that the movement had disavowed the explicitly Cath-
olic linkages in Comte's later works, Huxley made sure his readers would
not forget them when he described his positivist friend as a “catechist”
addressing the “professed catechumen.”
50
The many paragraphs carried
forth through satirical play are punctuated by others that manifest another
trademark of Huxleyan eloquence, flourishes of righteous indignation so
