Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
fact that matters of belief and of speculation are of absolutely infinite prac-
tical importance,” so now the same spirit continued its work in a new
“reformation,” the scientific revolution:
It insists on reopening all questions and asking all institutions, however
venerable, by what right they exist, and whether they are, or are not, in
harmony with the real or supposed wants of mankind. And it is remark-
able that these searching inquiries are not so much forced on institutions
from without, as developed from within. Consummate scholars question
the value of learning; priests contemn dogma; and women turn their
backs upon man's ideal of perfect womanhood, and seek satisfaction in
apocalyptic visions of some, as yet, unrealised epicene reality.
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Comte had made the spiritual authority of the Catholic Church the evolu-
tionary precursor to his emerging priesthood of science. Huxley was now
merely substituting the Protestant habit of scrutinizing tradition and dogma
as the evolutionary forerunner to scientific method. No less than his French
counterpart, he was projecting the ways of science back into a preexisting
narrative and, as a consequence of this, advancing the notion that the sci-
entific ways of the present were merely the natural consequence of some
process embedded within history's fabric.
The spontaneous fashion in which this emancipation had “developed
from within” institutions undoubtedly signaled the natural forces that
Huxley regarded as the genuine cause of such changes, but by leaving the
philosophical bases of his argument to the imagination, his Scotch Presby-
terian audience was free to interpret his message in a traditional Baconian
vein. Huxley's claim that science had its moral and historical roots in the
Reformation might still signal its ties to providence as the fruition of these
reforms within the broader arena of secular learning, but it could also sus-
tain an evolutionary view of history analogous to Comte's, in which science
represented the true spirit of the Reformation.
Huxley's commitment to the second of these readings is certainly more
apparent in his personal correspondence, where the pressures of rhetori-
cal accommodation were lessened, but even here he did not always aban-
don Protestant themes. In an 1873 letter sent to his wife, Henrietta, from
the Continent as he recuperated from the first of a series of breakdowns
brought on by overwork, Huxley declared that the same evolutionary mech-
anism that had brought about the rebirth of the Christian church was now
again giving birth to the age of science.
