Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
deterministic causality. It would be a hollow victory to declare science's rule
over a world despoiled by reductionism. The interactive attributes of meta-
phor ensure that this does not happen by taking advantage of what Kenneth
Burke once described as its ability simultaneously to bring out the “thisness
of a that” but also the “thatness of a this.”
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At one level, Huxley's caterpil-
lar metaphor, by seeming to say that “history is biology,” reduces history to
nature, thus maintaining science's absolute authority in the human realm.
But because metaphors cut both ways, Huxley's image also projects a more
traditional notion of historical purpose upon the biological world. The tacit
notion that “biology is history,” in other words, keeps the traditional reli-
gious meaning of Huxley's “well-worn metaphor” alive: since history is con-
tained within biology, it retains its traditional sense of purpose.
One subtlety of Huxley's metaphor that sustains the latter impression
is the fact that it is an image of
ontogeny
rather than of
phylogeny.
Despite
the blind determinism that biological evolution presupposes, the prepro-
grammed character of the individual organism's development conveys an
abiding sense of “design.” In this regard, while Huxley's image is consistent
with naturalism, it also tends to overreach it. Once ontogeny becomes a
metaphor for phylogeny, the provisional teleology that is recognizable in the
unfolding of the individual organism is projected upon all of biological his-
tory—and by Huxley's butterfly allegory, upon all of intellectual history as
well. So long as the periodic infusions of life that have forced a slumbering
humanity to shed outworn layers of knowledge were events bringing it ever
closer to some “imago” state, the ontogenetic end conveyed by this meta-
phor could draw back into a seemingly naturalistic view some of the teleo-
logical meaning already present within the reader's historical consciousness.
The progression of historical stages envisioned by Huxley bears an obvi-
ous similarity, as Ruth Barton has pointed out, to the scheme popularized
by Condorcet. But the biological metaphors that Huxley has laid over this
eighteenth-century vision of progress reinforce his more specific claim that
the social authority that had been emerging in these stages was destined to
culminate in the rule of the natural sciences.
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After the discovery of sci-
ence in antiquity, “whereby the Western races of Europe were enabled to
enter upon that progress towards true knowledge, which was commenced
by the philosophers of Greece,” learning was “arrested” as humanity fell
into “subsequent long ages of intellectual stagnation, or, at most gyration.”
All through time, and now especially with the “revival of learning . . . the
human larva has been feeding vigorously, and moulting in proportion,” but
as its “imago” state draws nearer in modernity, it has become evident that
