Biology Reference
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restore humanity to its proper place in the creation. The positivist coun-
terpart to this was the sociocratic millennium that would be realized once
human relationships were ordered by social science. The positivists' greater
optimism regarding social science's ability to order human subjectivity
reflected the Catholic tradition of centering authority within institutions,
and Huxley understood that he could counter positivism's persuasive appeal
by constructing an alternative vision that resonated with indigenous Protes-
tant sensibilities. Evolutionism achieved this by seeming to take its narrative
of history directly from nature, from the substance of biological science.
In this regard it represented a scientific notion of history that carried on a
Baconian cultural tradition rooted in the doctrine of
sola natura
.
What made positivists and agnostics different from their Baconian ante-
cedents was their insistence that history itself had now fallen under science's
command, and this takes us back to my earlier tweaking of Lenzer's claim
that positivism tends to degrade historical consciousness. My own inter-
pretation is that the positivists and their agnostic cousins did not so much
abandon as naturalize preexisting historical conceptions—that they tended
to sublimate history
into
science. Once we suppose that history is capable of
being transposed into theoretical rather than narrative terms, the theory of
history becomes a substitute for the evidences of history. This is something
that has trickled down even into elementary education, where (in the case
of the schools my children attended) “social studies” now seems to be taught
in lieu of history. Since theories explain historical development in terms of
principles or laws rather than in terms of characters and actions, many of
the details of history do not survive such transpositions. This explains why,
as Lenzer points out, contemporary positivists are unlikely to even know
who Auguste Comte was, despite his having founded their worldview.
68
The
aspiration to turn history into a science pushes in the direction of abstrac-
tion, leaving us with evolutionary conceptions of intellectual development
like the one that Comte articulated in his law of the three stages. Since it
was now natural law that explained history, there was little reason to under-
stand its particular actors. In the end, we might say that Comte orchestrated
his own disappearance from historical memory.
But my own interpretation of this pattern would predict that this ten-
dency toward abstraction would expunge only some details. Others need to
endure because they play a rhetorical role in drawing attention away from
the mimetic features of agnosticism and positivism. Huxley's place in public
memory is a case in point. He has not been forgotten so much as altered in
historical recollection in order to fit the parameters of the scientized history
