Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
been invited to represent the perspective of the new science in these meet-
ings, and this brought him into polite dialogue with religious conservatives
such as Cardinal Manning, the Duke of Argyll, William Gladstone, and,
perhaps most notably, William Thomson, the Anglican bishop whose lec-
ture had roused Huxley's anti-Comtian outburst just a few months before.
62
From 1869 until 1880, the “Metaphysicals” met nine times a year to present
and discuss papers on all the leading philosophical and religious issues of
the day. “Every variety of philosophical and theological opinion was repre-
sented,” Huxley would later recall, and initially this had caused him some
“uneasy feelings.” All of his “colleagues were
-ists
of one sort or another”
and he was “without a rag of a label to cover himself with.” If natural phi-
losophers were to stand among these others, they would need their own
identity, and it was this inventive pressure that inspired his selection of “the
appropriate title of 'agnostic.' ”
63
If Huxley did not take a label of his own, he could not forever fend
off the attempts of others to do this for him—the very danger he had faced
the previous fall in Edinburgh. In his first essay-length attack on positiv-
ism that same year, he complained of his constant “irritation” in finding
“M. Comte put forward as a representative of scientific thought; and to
observe that writers whose philosophy had its legitimate parent in Hume,
or in themselves, were labeled 'Comtists' or 'Positivists' by public writers,
even in spite of vehement protests to the contrary.” Huxley observed that
it had already cost John Stuart Mill “hard rubbings to get that label off,”
though he neglected to mention that Mill had once openly identified his
philosophy of science with Comte's, and Herbert Spencer was “ready to tear
away skin and all, rather than let it stick.” Worst of all, alluding now to the
Edinburgh incident, his “own turn might come next; and therefore, when
an eminent prelate the other day gave currency and authority to the popular
confusion,” Huxley made sure to show that Hume had been the true author
of this “New Philosophy.”
64
By asserting that the new scientific philosophy predated Comte's and
had risen up in fact from British soil, Huxley could weaken the prophetic
authority of positivism and distract attention from the similarity that his own
notion of scientific agnosticism shared with this movement. English observ-
ers were unlikely to notice that the idea of agnosticism was,
via negativa
, the
very idea expressed by the term positivism. What made positivism “positive”
was its devotion to an ideal of high empiricism that tolerated only the entry
of such claims into the realm of genuine knowledge as could show a solid fac-
tual basis. But the term agnostic was merely a negative expression of the same
