Scientism Scientized - Rhetorical Darwinism - page 226

grow into systems of Theology or of Philosophy, or veiled in musical lan-
guage which suggests more than it asserts, take the shape of the Poetry of
an epoch. 54
These persons are not scientists but only their kin, ancestral forms or per-
haps evolutionary dead ends. Their ways of seeking are failed efforts doomed
to die out by and by, but as links in an evolutionary progression they have
passed along traits that endure in the scientific temperament.
Here again we see how closely Huxley emulates the historical thinking of
the positivists. The more primitive religious stage in Comte's tripartite nar-
rative of history finds its counterpart in what Huxley now calls “tradition,”
and the transitional metaphysical stage of Comte's history has become one
dominated by philosophers, theologians, and poets whose brilliance antici-
pates science but is held back by its intermingling with mere skepticism and
non-naturalistic thought. And just as Comte admired the contributions to
social knowledge wrought by the Catholic Church, Huxley likewise gives
the theological geniuses of old their due by naming them among the natural
ancestors of modern science.
No less than Comte, Huxley purports to naturalize history, but it was
not in his interest to do so fully. Were naturalism to be purchased at the cost
of abandoning all notions of historical purpose, scientism would be unable
to attain the kind of cultural authority that could sustain scientific patron-
age. This trapped Huxley in a version of Durkheim's paradox. He wished
to appeal to evolution so as to naturalize other domains of inquiry as lesser
precursors to science, but the whole point of doing this was to enable sci-
ence to take possession of a historical authority like that claimed by these
ancestral forms. Huxley found his solution in the metaphorical potential of
evolution. Although evolution implied a naturalism that could depose reli-
gion, it also implied an ordered process of development that enabled Huxley
to depict science as an undertaking capable of understanding the “goals” of
history. Even as his efforts to situate religion and philosophy within a natu-
ralized chain of being subordinated them to the social authority of science,
the fact that this hierarchy had an evolutionary basis kept alive some of the
validity of these ancestral epistemologies. Once made into stages within a
unified evolutionary ladder, these older modes of inquiry would seem to
pass down their mantle of authority to the natural sciences.
Superficially, this evolutionary perspective did not abolish so much as
rework the traditional providential , apocalyptic , universal , and periodized mean-
ings that Christianity had formerly breathed into history. What Huxley had