Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
of his previous evolutionary arguments, and by doing so he draws the read-
er's attention away from the fact that the claims about human “dignity” that
he holds out with the other hand could not fall within the compass of such
scientific knowledge. Logically speaking, we might say that his argument
(albeit tacit) goes like this: since scientists “respect nothing but evidence,”
and since the arguer is a scientist, his conclusions about the dignity of the
human person must also fall within science's scope. Thus a vital ambiguity
of meaning persists as he goes on to say that it would be folly to base “Man's
dignity upon his great toe, or to insinuate that we are lost if an Ape has a
hippocampus minor.” Could not a “sensible child confute by obvious argu-
ments” the supposition that the poet or the philosopher is,
degraded from his high estate by the historical probability, not to say cer-
tainty, that he is the direct descendent of some naked and bestial savage,
whose intelligence was just sufficient to make him a little more cunning
than the Fox, and by so much more dangerous than the Tiger? Or is he
bound to howl and grovel on all fours because of the wholly unquestion-
able fact, that he was once an egg, which no ordinary power of discrimina-
tion could distinguish from that of a Dog? Or is the philanthropist, or the
saint, to give up his endeavours to lead a noble life, because the simplest
study of man's nature reveals, at its foundations, all the selfish passions,
and fierce appetites of the merest quadruped? Is mother-love vile because
a hen shows it, or fidelity base because dogs possess it?
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This series of rhetorical questions would seem to say that science is funda-
mentally limited, that the implications of evolution that many people find
offensive cannot be deduced from its teachings. But Huxley only
seems
to say
this; he never states in any overt way that these human qualities lie beyond
the scope of scientific explanation. His claims about the limits of science
are really only the diversion that enables this rhetorical magician to pull
meanings about love, creativity, and humanity's sense of its higher place
in nature from a scientistic hat. With their gaze firmly fixed upon the idea
that biological explanations have nothing to do with questions of value or
ultimate meaning, Huxley's nodding readers are unlikely to notice that the
opposite assumption appears to govern what comes next.
Healthy humanity, finding itself hard pressed to escape from real sin and
degradation, will leave the brooding over speculative pollution to the cyn-
ics and the “righteous overmuch,” who, disagreeing in everything else,
unite in blind insensibility to the nobleness of the visible world, and in
inability to appreciate the grandeur of the place Man occupies therein.
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