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poignant in imagery and phraseology that the breathtaken reader is given
no opportunity to reflect upon Huxley's own clerical posturing.
It is this monstrous religious abortion, with its adoration of an animistic
idol, nowise more respectable for being the work of man's brain instead of
his hands; with all its baleful consequences of spiritual tyranny and slav-
ish social “organization,” which I have done my best, at intervals, during
the last quarter of a century, to separate from everything that has a right
to the name of scientific thought or of wholesome ethical aspiration; and
it would appear that even the epigoni of Comte have, at last, come round
to my side.
51
Were we to lift this last passage from its context and alter the language that
specifically signals its Comtian subject matter, it might easily be mistaken
for a theological attack upon that other threat to the Victorian establish-
ment, the rising Catholicism of the Oxford movement. Huxley's attack
purports to contrast science against pseudoscience, but by comparing the
latter to Catholicism he inevitably aligns the former with Protestantism.
The same parallel between false science and Catholic idolatry that Bacon
once exploited to such great effect is very much alive here. So also is the old
alliance between empirical science and Christian virtue. It is positivism's
blind imitation of Catholicism that Huxley strikes at most forcefully, but he
could not merely by virtue of superior wit or righteous abhorrence escape
the Protestant orbit of his native culture. In terms of the Geertzian premise
that I invoked in chapter 1, we would put this down to a merely imitative
constraint. If cultures can develop only by reworking the materials they
inherit from their forebears, we would expect something similar from Hux-
ley. A rhetorical perspective supports a similar view. In principle, those who
give voice to scientism will assert that progress moves in a rectilinear fash-
ion within the vacuum of scientific objectivity, uninfluenced except by the
inertia of reason and fact, but if scientism is to have public support it must
always bend, wittingly or unwittingly, to the gravitational pull of culture. In
Huxley's case, we have reason to suppose that some intentionality was also
involved. His preoccupation with the concrete work of establishing science's
position within the new institutional and social order that was arising in
Victorian England made him mindful of what successful rhetorical actors
always recognize, namely that such ends can only be achieved, as Donald C.
Bryant famously described this art, by “adjusting ideas to people and people
to idea s.”
52
Even if Huxley had not been inclined to imitate the themes
of England's Protestant culture simply because he swam in its waters, his
