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and many others. Evolutionism's stronger identification with evolutionary
science enables it to sustain the impression that naturalism and scientism
are mere inductive generalizations arising from the data of nature—from
science itself. To stand upon evolutionism is to hold that nature is all that
is, that science alone knows nature, and, most importantly, that these two
claims have a scientific basis.
In light of this, it is not surprising that we should find in the agnosti-
cism of Thomas Henry Huxley, who I will present later in this topic as the
first great architect of mature evolutionism, an active campaign to nullify
the competing authority of philosophy. One of the curiosities of Huxley's
rhetorical career was his inclination to claim that the epistemologies of
Kant and Hume were the bases of naturalism and scientism, and then to
deny this very thing by loudly insisting that he embraced no philosophy but
science. 47 But this inconsistency makes sense once we understand evolu-
tionism's power to subsume philosophy within science. Had Huxley simply
grounded science in an epistemology authorized by philosophers, he would
have perpetuated its dependency upon external authority. He would have
conceded the determination of science's value and authority to outsiders,
entitling them to the lion's share of public support he wished to secure for
the army of scientific laborers he was mustering. Agnosticism, as a kind
of anti-philosophy that denied all philosophical and theological authority,
negated this threat. But to do so it needed to sustain the idea that science
was capable of providing the kind of knowledge these other fields had for-
merly authorized, and this is what evolutionism added to agnosticism for
Huxley. Evolutionary science became for him a mythical vehicle through
which to envision a future in which all knowledge, material as well as moral,
would be brought within the compass of science. Thus from the standpoint
of evolutionism, Huxley was not bowing to a higher philosophical author-
ity when he invoked the names of Kant and Hume; rather, he was bringing
these figures into a scientistic framework in which they were science's evo-
lutionary precursors.
The stories I opened this chapter with reflect a second rhetorical advan-
tage of evolutionism. Because evolutionary science constructs a develop-
mental view of nature, a “natural history,” to use its more traditional name,
it also taps into the persuasive power of those familiar narrative forms that
traditionally give historical accounts their persuasive power. The stuff of
evolutionary science is not history per se. As I think Hayden White rightly
surmises, history is never a mere chronology of events such as we might
expect to find in a Science or Nature article on the descent of whales from
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