Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
in fact done was to continue to invoke these categories of historical ideation
while keeping the biological world of science within sight so as to maintain
the appearance that these concepts referenced natural truths. He naturalizes
the notion of
providence
, for instance, by aligning the patient and reserved
gradualism that enables scientific inquiry to advance with the gradualism of
evolutionary development. He does this by employing the term “Time” as a
metaphor (or more properly, as a metonym) to stand in simultaneously for
both the unfolding of events in natural history and the gradual enlargement
of scientific knowledge. While each “answer to the great question” promul-
gated by lower forms of inquiry may purport “to be complete and final,” and
may remain for many centuries “in high authority and esteem,”
Time proves each reply to have been a mere approximation to the truth—
tolerable chiefly on account of the ignorance of those by whom it was
accepted, and wholly intolerable when tested by the larger knowledge of
their successors.
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To say that it is “Time” that corrects the answers proffered in the past is to
push human agency out of this historical picture. The progress of science in
this regard appears to follow a preordained course and to keep pace, so to
speak, with biological evolution. Unlike the ossified knowledge that mani-
fested in the ancestral inquiries of tradition and genius, science alone moves
in harmony with the natural rhythms of evolutionary growth.
By implying that science was the incarnation of natural time, that the
ways of evolution had now entered into human self-consciousness, Huxley
was asserting that science was the
apocalypse
of history, the vital intersection
of
nomos
and
cosmos
from which all of history could now be understood.
Because such inquiry self-consciously stood with “Time” by virtue of its sin-
gular devotion to those methods that forever hold inquiry open to correc-
tion, it now stood in the gap between nature and culture and was prepared
to guide history into the future. Being of one mind with the universe, sci-
ence was the only enterprise of learning that was always in step with natural
history. Like evolution itself, it never presumed to hold “complete and final”
truth but was always kept in motion by being “tested.”
Once regarded as playing this prophetic role, the scientific perspective
on history likewise achieved a
universal
scope.
In the Christian worldview, all
merely human understandings of history needed to be rejected, as Colling-
wood explains this, because they were governed by a “particularistic centre
of g rav it y.”
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Those without revelation could only understand the passage of
