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he himself worked to create. The lukewarm attitude toward Darwin's theory
that we find in the Huxley of history bears little resemblance to the attitude
attributed to the Huxley of legend, Darwin's fervent bulldog. Similarly, his
agnosticism, though in reality as much an answer to positivism as to reli-
gious orthodoxy, has become only the latter. Both of these characteristic
distortions (the first of which I will treat more fully in the next chapter)
are consistent with what evolutionism requires as an effort to theorize his-
tory: the more closely evolutionism is identified with evolutionary science,
the more effectively its derivation from religious notions of history must
be occulted. Were we to become too cognizant of the fact that Huxley was
adapting evolutionary notions to a traditional notion of providence, evo-
lutionism would lose its ability to sustain that identity with nature that
upholds science's priestly standing.
Before examining this conflation of history and evolutionary science
more closely, I would like to close by looking at the Protestant sensibilities
that endured not only in Huxley's own psyche but also in his public polem-
ics. This will set the stage for the next chapter by accounting for why the
historical themes that coincide with the Protestant point of view would tend
to become so pronounced as evolutionism was being blended into his public
treatments of evolutionary science.
Huxley's overt appeals to tradition may have been instrumental in his
vigorous campaign to fix the value of science in the English consciousness,
but this does not mean that they were therefore merely cynical attempts to
make scientism seem compatible with orthodoxy. This attraction was per-
sonal, at least in part. Like other positivistic thinkers, Huxley also happened
to be a member of the society he was trying to win over to his scientistic
way of thinking, and this made it equally difficult for him to transcend that
society's habits of thought. If anything, his own personality contributed to
this tendency. In a brief autobiographical essay, he conceded the truth of
Herbert Spencer's charge that he was possessed of “strong clerical affinities,”
and even as he maintained that these had “for the most part remained in a
latent state,” there is ample reason to believe that they fueled his rhetorical
aspirations. The small boy who once emulated a favorite local parson by
turning his “pinafore wrong side forwards in order to represent a surplice”
as he preached to his mother's maids in the kitchen, grew into an adult who
genuinely thought to make science the stuff of prophecy.
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While Huxley
was certainly being whimsical when he called himself a “bishop” and in all
things a “good Protestant” in his personal correspondence, in public he was
inclined to act out these roles in earnest.
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