Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
idolatrous sacerdotalism which has, even now, provided us with the sad-
dest spectacle which has been offered to the eyes of Englishmen in this
generation.
73
Huxley gained additional emotional leverage by parading before his readers'
Protestant eyes the hair-raising specter of the Oxford movement, which was
threatening established interests from another side, but his primary aim
was to maintain the preexistent alignment which had placed science within
this familiar picture of historical destiny. He was arguing that the agnostic
spirit that guided his own inquiries represented the same principle which
had enabled the Reformation to advance beyond such corruptions. It was
the orthodox that were “backsliding,” while scientific naturalists remained
at the forefront of progress. To challenge Huxley's right to read the Bible as
he saw fit was not just hypocritical; it was a sin against history.
There is no mistaking the fact that such claims reflected a framework
of historical premises similar to the ones that also sustained the positivists'
faith in progress. Since he shared their belief that all paths of inquiry were
destined to culminate in positive science, he likewise shared their belief that
this was religion's destiny as well. What made Huxley's position different
from Comte's, aside from his Protestant angle, was that he was typically
more circumspect about openly declaring the arrival of a positivist Chris-
tendom. But with audiences likely to be more sympathetic to such views,
he spoke more openly. In a letter penned to Kingsley in 1869 as he was
preparing his response to the objections that Congreve had raised after his
Edinburgh speech, Huxley affirmed his agreement with Comte's supposi-
tion that the progress of science leads inevitably in this direction—to the
very religious ends he had seemed to ridicule the previous winter.
I shall endeavour to be just to what there is (as I hold), really great and
good in his clear conception of the necessity of reconstructing society
from the bottom to the top “sans dieu ni roi,” if I may interpret that
somewhat tall phrase as meaning “with our conceptions of religion and
politics on a scientific basis.”
74
In the
Fortnightly
essay that soon followed, Huxley did not indict Comte's
general religious aspirations at all. He carefully bracketed off from criticism
the general premise that he shared with the Frenchman, their mutual antici-
pation of a scientific religion to come, before launching a frontal assault
upon the real object of his contempt, the Catholic features of Comte's
vision. In Comte's chapters on “speculative and practical sociology,” Huxley
