Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
and to challenge naturalism was to reject history's destined course. Thus
when Huxley alluded to ecclesiastical resistance to evolution, he was not just
reprimanding religionists for opposing scientific truth; he was also making
the broader claim that the English oligarchy that still exercised regulatory
control over higher education stood against progress itself.
The supposition that the continued regulatory control of science by the
Anglican hierarchy was fundamentally at odds with the upward movement
of progress required as one of its correlate assumptions the belief that reli-
gion and science had always been natural enemies. It was to bolster this
premise that Huxley went on to invoke that favorite device of Victorian sci-
ence, the legend (to which he was no minor contributor) which holds that
the science of yesterday had been besieged at every turn by a militant fideism.
I hardly know of a great physical truth, whose universal reception has not
been preceded by an epoch in which most estimable persons have main-
tained that the phenomena investigated were directly dependent on the
Divine Will, and that the attempt to investigate them was not only futile,
but blasphemous. And there is a wonderful tenacity of life about this sort
of opposition to physical science. Crushed and maimed in every battle, it
yet seems never to be slain; and after a hundred defeats it is at this day as
rampant, though happily not so mischievous, as in the time of Galileo.
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Questionable as this claim might seem given that his country's scientific
revolution had unfolded rather successfully in a milieu dominated by faith
in “Divine Will,” the premise that science and religion are innately polar-
ized is an essential part of Huxley's budding evolutionism. If the unlimited
scope of naturalism that Darwin's work symbolized revealed a historical
path that could only be followed if science led the way, the past would have
to bear witness to this as well. If the science of the past had faced only
limited or occasional opposition from religion, one might suppose that the
status quo merely needed to be reformed. On the other hand, a foe that was
as “rampant” as it was unyielding in its immoral “tenacity” would need to
be utterly deposed.
In spite of Huxley's determination to end the regulatory influence that
religious institutions exercised over science, the historical meaning of the
symbolic polarity he appealed to in doing so was derived from the very
theological worldview he was attacking. The theological identity that Bacon
had forged between science and religion had disappeared, but the histori-
cal narrative that formerly sustained this identity had not. Bacon had pre-
sented the conflict between the new science and the older scholasticism as
