Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
desire to adapt his messages to an audience of potential patrons (many of
whom were still believing Christians) invited conscious deliberation and
strategizing of this sort.
A contemporaneous rhetorical pattern is the one observed in John
Angus Campbell's elucidations of the similar generic ancestry that Darwin's
writing finds in the traditions of British natural theology.
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In spite of the
revolutionary character of Darwin's position, its presentation manifested
a similar conservation of cultural energy and mass by drawing from the
“specific heritage” of natural theology, the “language,
topoi
, maxims, prob-
lems, and conventions of reasoning” that this great scientist shared with
his readers. Darwin transformed this rhetorical tradition by “reinventing
it.”
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Huxley was doing much the same, not only in the discursive arena of
scientific writing per se, but also in the broader arena of public discourse in
which science was reinventing its cultural identity. If Darwin was the new
Bishop Paley of the evolutionary age, Huxley was its new Bacon.
As I suggested earlier, one act of rhetorical invention that manifests this
was Huxley's coining of the term “agnostic” in 1869. When Huxley declared
himself to be one who does not know, in contradistinction to the many
“gnostics” around him who thought they did, he was invoking one side of a
dialectical pattern already favorable to the Protestant mind. The Protestant
exclusion of all that lies outside the limits of revelation had been a move
of the same kind, a decision to err on the side of caution lest the complex
multivocality of an alternative authority based in Catholic tradition should
undermine orthodoxy. The reformers had thought that theological mini-
malism of this kind would keep the church from sliding back into its old
errors, and Bacon's application of this principle to empirical science prom-
ised the same benefit. True empiricism would ensure that science remained
true to revelation. So long as inquiry remained within the text of nature,
the old Baconian doctrine had supposed, it was not possible for it to over-
step its reach. Of course, it was Huxley's precise intention to undermine the
religious orthodoxy that this principle once promised to sustain; even as he
was appealing to this traditional religious premise in an effort to enlarge
public support for science, he was also working to pin the Protestant estab-
lishment in a corner of its own making.
My supposition that the limits of knowledge proposed by the term
agnostic would have resonated with the Baconian consciousness of science's
traditional patrons is corroborated by Bernard Lightman's argument that
the model for Huxley's agnostic position was the influential 1858 Bamp-
ton lecture of the high churchman Henry Mansel,
The
Limits of Religious
