Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
being incorporated into nature as innate features. Since Huxley is speak-
ing as a scientist, we might suppose that he means to advance materialism,
but the traditional theistic language that is also present when he speaks of
“Nature's great progression” points in the direction of pantheism.
Huxley hinted at his willingness to entertain such a deified universe
in his private correspondence with Charles Kingsley later that same year.
He conceded that he was “too much a believer in Butler and in the great
principle of the 'Analogy' . . . to have any difficulty about miracles,” and
he therefore had not “the least sympathy with the
a priori
reasons against
orthodoxy.”
66
Of course, in tossing this bone to religious tradition, Huxley
was only appeasing his theologian friend, and he goes on to clarify that he
was not about to consider a supernatural worldview. But his rejection of
Kingsley's views did not stand on anything like an agnostic refusal to sup-
pose that religious knowledge is possible; rather, it stood upon his prefer-
ence for a different analogical reading of nature.
I cannot see one shadow or tittle of evidence that the great unknown
underlying the phenomena of the universe stands to us in the relation
of a Father—loves us and cares for us as Christianity asserts. On the con-
trary, the whole teaching of experience seems to me to show that while
the governance (if I may use the term) of the universe is rigorously just
and substantially kind and beneficent, there is no more relation of affec-
tion between governor and governed than between me and the twelve
judges. I know the administrators of the law desire to do their best for
everybody, and that they would rather not hurt me than otherwise, but
I also know that under certain circumstances they will most assuredly
hang me; and that in any case it would be absurd to suppose them guided
by any particular affection for me.
67
Huxley did not reject Butler's natural theology because he rejected the ana-
logical reasoning that sustained it; rather, it was because analogical reason-
ing was pushing him in another direction. Huxley only questioned whether
the ruler of the universe was so completely benevolent as to be compara-
ble to a “Father,” and, as he would clarify in his next missive to Kingsley,
whether this deity was transcendent rather than immanent. Materialism
and pantheism were equivalent readings of nature, “according as you turn it
heads or tails,” and pantheism “chimes in better with the rules of the game
of nature” than any other cosmology.
68
The outcomes of meaning that Huxley achieved by shifting into this
analogical mode of argument are by no means distinctive to
Man's Place
