Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
Huxley has turned the tables. It is science that truly appreciates the “noble-
ness of the visible world” and the grandeur of humanity's “place” within
it, and it is the foes of evolution who “unite in blind insensibility” against
virtue. More “thoughtful men, once escaped from the blinding influences
of traditional prejudice,” will discover in the “lowly stock whence Man has
sprung, the best evidence of the splendour of his capacities; and will discern
in his long progress through the Past, a reasonable ground of faith in his
attainment of a nobler Future.”
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The analogy of nature, we might say, has occasioned a kind of equivo-
cation. Evolution means the merely observable development of life when
Huxley wishes to remind his readers of the special scientific rigors that sus-
tain the more general case laid out in his topic, but at other moments the
concept of evolution is imbued with qualities of “splendour,” “nobleness,”
and “grandeur of place” that a science so conceived could never detect.
Since materialism and pantheism were, to Huxley's mind, not distin-
guishable categories, this dual use of the evolutionary concept reflected no
personal dishonesty. This pattern misleads only in its tendency to cloak
what it is doing behind a professional scientific cover. Having prefaced these
metaphysical speculations by insisting that scientists “respect nothing but
evidence,” he invites his readers to suppose that these claims arise somehow
from evidence.
The same pattern of adding allegorical interpretation to straightforward
scientific claims continues as Huxley closes. Still working to confute the
“passion and prejudice” that resisted the new evolutionary perspective, he
ends by representing humanity's elevated state as “that great Alps and Andes
of the living world.” The opponent of human evolution is likened to the
Alpine traveler who cannot fathom the geologist's assertion that something
so grand could have arisen by evolutionary gradualism, that “the mountains
soaring into the sky” are but the “hardened mud of primeval seas or the
cooled slag of subterranean furnaces. . . but raised by inward forces to that
place of proud and seemingly inaccessible glory.” Superficially, the point of
this analogy is to show that just as the beauty and grandeur of the mountains
is not lessened once we discover their gradual formation, neither should our
appreciation of human nature be diminished once its animal origins are
recognized. The fact that a mountain range evolved across eons cannot erase
the features that now make it so striking. In fact, the evolutionary perspec-
tive complements rather than diminishes “our reverence and our wonder” by
adding “all the force of intellectual sublimity to the mere æsthetic intuition
of the uninstructed beholder.”
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