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that had plagued science since the seventeenth century: scientific patronage
had always depended upon the public appeal of scientistic movements, and
because the motives of such movements were never fully consistent with the
interests of scientific inquiry, the need to tap this rhetorical resource had
always risked compromise and co-optation. Baconianism was thoroughly
scientistic, but as an ideology closely identified with clerical interests, it was
also responsible for setting up the social barriers that had frustrated Hux-
ley's early aspirations. The older ideology had made the fate of the scientific
laborer dependent upon an Anglican worldview not subject to scientific
interpretation and therefore not subject to scientific control. Huxley had
come into a scientific world that relied on the goodwill of powers that were
blindly disposed to bar its gates against him.
In proposing to substitute a sociological hierarchy for an Anglican one,
English positivism threatened to institutionalize a new set of compromises,
and it was under the competitive pressure of its rising influence that Hux-
ley began to articulate a more fine-tuned rendition of the old Baconian
faith. Agnosticism retained the basic features of Comte's ideology, its radi-
cal empiricism, a philosophy of history purporting to have scientific creden-
tials, and even a proposed scientific religion, but it redefined the positivist
creed so as to entrust authority only to the natural sciences. The scientific
laboratory, Huxley now declared, was “the fore-court of the temple of phi-
losophy,” and “whoso has not offered sacrifices and undergone purification
there has little chance of admission into the sanctuary.” David Hume was
the high priest who had represented the faithful in this holy of holies, while
Comte illustrated only “the connection of scientific incapacity with philo-
sophical incompetence.” 1 Scientific capacity, in fact, now meant the same
thing as philosophical competence—science was philosophy.
The emerging evolutionary paradigm symbolized science's absolute
supremacy, and thus it invited appropriation by Huxley. The positivists had
already proposed a social evolutionary model as the basis for their claim that
all the roads of history lead to science, and if Huxley hoped to outdo them
in scientizing scientism, the most logical move was to ground history in bio-
logical evolution. But this is only one side of his alternative scientism. His
constant criticism of the positivist view of history was that its scientific pre-
tensions were undermined by its obvious mimetic basis, but he was unable
to resist the allure of an analogous construction. Thus, just as Comte and
Saint-Simon had made sociology the evolutionary descendent of Catholi-
cism, Huxley presented his own universalized natural science as the heir
of the Reformation. This version of the positivist narrative appealed to his
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