Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
forces exerted by the latter and all other forces, I can see no excuse for
doubting that all are co-ordinated terms of Nature's great progression,
from the formless to the formed—from the inorganic to the organic—from
blind force to conscious intellect and will.
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Having just cautioned that Darwin's theory should not gain full acceptance
until it could stand up to the highest evidentiary standards, it seems odd
that Huxley would then go on to assert that a “complete and crushing”
proof for evolution is found in a much less rigorous argument, the basis of
which was founded on analogy. But this move makes rhetorical sense once
we recognize that Huxley is now transitioning back into the same mythic
mode with which he had begun the chapter.
The mythical potential of this argument may be detected in the similar-
ity that Huxley's phrase “whole analogy of natural operations” bears to the
“whole analogy of nature” that had been the basis for Joseph Butler's (1692-
1752) influential defense of Christianity.
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Against the popular deism of the
eighteenth century, which had rejected the revelations of the Bible, Bishop
Butler had advanced the supposition that one could argue by analogy “from
that part of the Divine government over intelligent creatures which comes
under our view” to the sacred revelation which discloses “that larger and
more general government over them which is beyond it.”
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Butler's
Analogy
of Religion
(1736) still weighed heavily upon English thought well into the
middle of the nineteenth century, and like other theological arguments that
Huxley admired, it invited emulation.
No similar meaning might at first seem to be afoot in the above para-
graph since Huxley is employing analogy to argue for an all-encompassing
naturalism. He seems only to argue that the universality of evolution fol-
lowed inductively from the ever-growing number of natural explanations
that science had already amassed. What the reader may not notice, however,
is that the innate ambiguity of analogy as an argumentative form has also
enabled Huxley to entertain a notion of evolution that goes far beyond any-
thing that could be reasoned out from Darwin's mechanism. While Hux-
ley's analogy brings “conscious intellect and will” within the compass of
secondary causation, he does not address what this seems to imply, namely
that the transcendent freedom that notions of will and consciousness typi-
cally denote have evaporated into a deterministic mist. This leaves open
two alternative meanings, one materialistic and one pantheistic: either the
universal compass of evolution has abolished those qualitative features that
traditionally set consciousness and will apart, or consciousness and will are
