Biology Reference
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preoccupied with spiritual matters as any of the religious leaders he so vigor-
ously opposed. This has been known by Huxley scholars for some time, and
it was something he himself plainly acknowledged. Late in life, he would
profess to Wilfrid Philip Ward, the son of one of the “metaphysicals” who
had become his neighbor and intimate during his seacoast retirement to
Eastbourne, that his opposition had only been against theology, not reli-
gion. Huxley denied that he had ever, except by force of appearances, been
a mere scoffer; he had in fact always been a firm believer in Spinoza's God.
1
In the early decades of his public life, it had been necessary to carry forward
a “literary militancy” against the religious establishment that controlled the
purse strings of scientific patronage.
2
Now, with these forces neutralized,
science's elder statesman was free to openly affirm the alternative religiosity
that he had more surreptitiously advanced in
Man's Place in Nature.
Those somewhat acquainted with the best-known work of Huxley's
later years, the Romanes lecture given just two years before his passing,
might suppose that it offers evidence against the religious themes that I
have detected in this earlier treatment—or perhaps, at minimum, that it
contains something like a death-bed conversion to a more genuine material-
ism. Indeed, many contemporaries who heard or read “Evolution and Eth-
ics” thought that it marked the scientist's rejection of evolutionary progress.
It upset some of the agnostic faithful, and it comforted opponents like St.
George Mivart, a former pupil (now turned Darwinian apostate) who saw
Huxley's apparent separation of natural evolution from ethics as a conces-
sion to supernaturalism.
3
But what Mivart saw was really only a refinement
of his teacher's earlier evolutionism. The mistake here is the supposition
that terms like “nature” and “evolution” had ever merely denoted a mun-
dane physical realm for Huxley. He had declared in his 1869 lecture, “The
Physical Basis of Life,” that while his terms were “distinctly materialistic,”
he himself was “no materialist” and believed “materialism to involve grave
philosophical error.”
4
In reality, Huxley was a Spinozean pantheist; he just
happened to be in the habit of using scientific language to represent his
faith in this immanent deity. His materialistic language did reference the
phenomena
of natural evolution, but it also referenced, as
noumena
, the per-
sonified Cosmos of Goethe that Huxley put on display that same year when
he quoted the German poet to open the first issue of
Nature.
She was a god-
dess who “without asking, or warning . . . snatches us up into her circling
dance, and whirls us on until we are tired and drop from her arms.”
5
When
Huxley later seemed to set Darwinian natural evolution and ethical prog-
ress at odds in his Romanes lecture, he was not genuinely retreating from
