Biology Reference
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traditionalism of men like Lyell, to a new empirical, naturalistic basis.” 45
As a powerful demonstration of the viability of a strictly naturalistic sci-
ence of life, one that now encompassed even human nature, the topic was
his checkmate against the hated Richard Owen's transcendentalist anat-
omy that had dominated natural history. But Paradis also shows Huxley's
broader ambitions.
Like Matthew Arnold, Huxley dreamed of the “harmonious whole,”
doubting, however, the powers of Victorians or their immediate twentieth-
century descendants to achieve it. Nevertheless, he invested considerable
energy in an attempt to discover the outline of a “coherent system” which
would unify “human life and the world,” and set out to enlist the scientist
as an ally of intellectual freedom in the archetypal struggle between free
thought and traditional or ideological authority. Such a unity, he had
hoped early in his career, might take the form of a naturalistic system in
which ethical order was established as the premise of social order, histori-
cal processes of nature and human society were shown to be uniform, and
the universal order of nature was accepted by all as the great absolute of
existence. Extensive notes Huxley left behind in his manuscripts reveal
that his system would have borrowed from Greek Stoical thought and
from the philosophy of Spinoza, incorporating the principle of evolution-
ary progression as the driving force of the whole. 46
This is the broader ideological backdrop against which Man's Place in
Nature was written. To regard it as a mere scientific treatise or even as part of
Huxley's internal struggle against Owen's blending of Continental Naturphi-
losophen with an indigenous Platonism would be to overlook an important
feature of the topic. 47 This is likely to happen simply because scientistic
arguments always pull their ideological claims back within the compass of
science. In Huxley's case, this occurs largely through the devices of meta-
phor just outlined, when historical notions are couched in the same scien-
tific language that the author employs to discuss biological evolution. Seen
through the window of biological evolution, the evolutionism that Huxley
is also promulgating becomes invisible.
One of the terms that sustains this mythical transparency is the notion
of “place” that is featured in the topic's title. As a spatial metaphor, “place”
supports Huxley's scientific purposes by signifying the relative position that
organisms occupy within the continuum of development that Darwin had
imposed upon the animal world. But “place” does not easily shake off its cul-
turally laden meaning as a hierarchical metaphor, and Huxley exploits this
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