Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
The characteristic agnostic rejection of all truth claims that lie beyond
the reach of fact is plainly in evidence here, but so also are the Protestant
sensibilities of the religious culture that Kingsley represented. Had he been
explaining this ethic to one of his more like-minded friends, it would have
undoubtedly shed these New Testament trappings for the more pantheistic
language of Carlyle and Goethe that he had imbibed in his youth.
59
But
because he shared the belief of his friend John Morley that the supernatu-
ralism which “stirs men first” would in the “later fulness of years and wider
experience of life draw them to a wise and not inglorious acquiescence in
Naturalism,” he could continue to use the language of orthodoxy in good
conscience.
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And so the hermeneutical ethic of Protestantism remained
even as he frankly shifted its basis into nature.
With Huxley's emergence in the late 1860s, the need to link scientific
mores with traditional Protestant ones became more pressing. His election
at age forty-three as president of the British Association for the Advance-
ment of Science (BAAS) in 1869 signaled the fact that Tory control was
giving way to a more autonomous scientific order, much as the positivists
had envisioned. But Huxley was too shrewd a political thinker to allow this
to be seen as a victory for the Comtians, who were certain to demand a
share of this new power, or as a rebuff to the traditional interests that were
nervously letting go of control.
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Science still depended upon the goodwill
of the old order, and the Protestant nuances of the agnostic label he had
now adopted reflected this balancing act. It was a term that enabled him
to express the epistemological exclusivism of positivism upon which this
newfound autonomy depended, yet without calling himself a “positivist.” It
was also a term suggesting an intellectual neutrality that resonated with the
Baconian sensibilities that still infused the consciousness of science's tradi-
tional patrons. To call the true followers of science agnostics was to say that
they abjured those idols of the mind that had formerly established science's
moral kinship with the Christian faith.
In this regard it should not surprise us to find that it was before several
of England's leading churchmen that the new BAAS president first used
this term in 1869. Its invention was occasioned by his participation in the
Metaphysical Society, a symposium of English intellectuals organized by
James Knowles, the editor of the
Contemporary Review
, which later became
Nineteenth Century
. Knowles' ambition was to bring together men of diverse
opinion in the hope that some rapprochement might be achieved between
traditional viewpoints and the various new “-isms” that were radicalizing
London society. Huxley, along with John Tyndall and Leslie Stephen, had
