Biology Reference
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climb steeply toward the heavens. Having been turned on its side to better
accord with the evolutionary doctrine, these steps have become historical
moments rising toward the human form that leads this procession, the evo-
lutionary engine of scientific humanity that has put the rest of the biological
world in its train. As both evolution's discoverer and its ultimate product,
only science is fully erect and fully capable of peering down the track of
natural history into the future.
Of course I am not asserting that the Hawkins lithograph manifests
such ideas by itself. Rather, it is because it has been placed alongside the
vision of intellectual development that Huxley proffers on the next page that
it invites such a metaphoric reading. Huxley in fact gives further encourage-
ment to this interpretation of Hawkins' marching skeletons as he goes on
to describe a progression of antecedent types that has led up to the modern
“natural philosopher.” The mass of humanity trapped in “respectable tradi-
tion” has been succeeded in history by a small minority of “restless spirits,”
the “genius” and the “skeptic” who broke away from tradition but failed to
find any satisfactory alternative. From their ranks those seekers after “true
knowledge” have emerged who are Huxley's natural philosophers. We might
think of Huxley's traditionalists as the social-evolutionary counterparts to
the gibbon in the Hawkins lithograph. In this evolutionary scheme, they are
the furthest removed from true science, inclined to flee from fact whenever
faced by those “difficulties and dangers which beset the seeker after original
answers to these riddles.” These less evolved thinkers are content to ignore
“original answers” or to “smother the investigating spirit under the feather-
bed of respected and respectable tradition.” The various “restless spirits”
who are their heirs are closer in this evolutionary hierarchy to the true natu-
ral philosopher, much as the gorilla and chimpanzee are to the human form
in Hawkins' drawing. But these are failed scientists marked by an obvious
inferiority. In anticipation of the modern scientific spirit, these hulking and
beetle-browed ancestors, the theologians, philosophers, and poets of the
past and present, dared to “strike out into paths of their own.” But while
they were “blessed with that constructive genius, which can only build on a
secure foundation, or cursed with the spirit of mere scepticism” that refused
to follow in the “comfortable track” of tradition, they were also “unmindful
of thorns and stumbling-blocks.” Their destiny was not scientific truth.
The sceptics end in the infidelity which asserts the problem to be insolu-
ble, or in the atheism which denies the existence of any orderly progress
and governance of things: the men of genius propound solutions which
