Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
time as they experienced it, but prophecy enabled the Christian to under-
stand, if only through a glass darkly, the universal plan of creation. If Chris-
tians understood something of the whole plan of history, it was because
they looked down upon it from above, from a divinely ordered perspective
capable of situating each of history's passing moments within an unfolding
plan. The vantage point of evolutionary knowledge, now enlarged by Hux-
ley to account for intellectual as well as biological development, provided
the naturalized counterpart to this divine point of view. Since the Darwin-
ian revolution had put science in possession of the very principle of history,
science was uniquely able to appreciate its whole and thus to overturn those
more particularistic understandings promulgated by others.
Universalism implies a historical continuity that the facts of history
will always seem to belie, and it is for this reason that Huxley also needed
to
periodize
the past. By interpreting these various periods of knowledge as
stages within a developmental process leading up to science, he could create
unity within disunity. We might say that his construction of these various
epochs functions as a kind of theodicy of history. They account for the
unscientific character of the past while affirming the scientific end toward
which history is leading.
The need to maintain these traditional elements of historical under-
standing stood at odds with the scientific purposes of Huxley's topic, and
his negotiation of this tension required some carefully selected symbols. His
solution was to mask these historical ideas in biological metaphors. Thus
he opens the section of his topic entitled “The Mental Ecdyses of Man”
by proclaiming a “parallel” between the past stages of religious speculation
that gave way to philosophy, theology, and art in “the mental progress of the
race,” and those stages comprising “the metamorphosis of the caterpillar
into the butterfly.”
History shows that the human mind, fed by constant accessions of knowl-
edge, periodically grows too large for its theoretical coverings, and bursts
them asunder to appear in new habiliments, as the feeding and growing
grub, at intervals, casts its too narrow skin and assumes another, itself but
temporary. Truly the imago state of Man seems to be terribly distant, but
every moult is a step gained, and of such there have been many.
57
As a biological comparison, the butterfly device effectively keeps the
premise of evolutionary naturalism before Huxley's readers even as it sus-
tains religious associations as a metaphor. Without this alternative meaning,
Huxley's world picture would be in danger of evaporating back into mere
