Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
patronage for the natural sciences. Its importance for my thesis is found in
the creative inspiration and competition its writers offered for the natural
scientific evolutionism that was soon to emerge.
The competitive influence and inspiration of positivism will become
especially apparent once we consider Thomas Huxley's role as evolution-
ism's chief architect. One of the lesser-known hallmarks of Huxley's rhe-
torical career was his perennial jousting with English positivists, a group of
prominent intellectuals who coveted his endorsement. The positivists had
good reason to regard Huxley as one of their own. His scientific oratory rang
with similar ideals of scientism and naturalism, and he was a close friend
and intellectual ally of Herbert Spencer—who came as close as any British
writer to inventing an indigenous version of French positivism. But what
drove Huxley as a public actor was his keen sensitivity to science's deficient
patronage, and while positivism had drawn much of its ideological inspira-
tion from the natural sciences, it also threatened to replace England's older
clerical hierarchy with a new one governed by sociological priests. Huxley
recognized that to embrace positivism was to perpetuate science's subservi-
ence. I believe that this competitive threat was the crucible in which evo-
lutionism took form. If the positivists were poised to set themselves atop a
new spiritual hierarchy by claiming to have attained a scientific mastery of
history, Huxley needed a science of history that would do the same for the
army of professional scientists he was raising up. Suitable material from
which to build this was being made available in the evolutionary science
that was emerging around the time he entered public life.
The fact that Huxley recognized in Darwin's achievement an opportu-
nity to advance evolutionism is supported by the consistent way in which
he drew these subjects together in his public treatments of evolutionary
science. In
Man's Place in Nature
(1863), for instance, we find him making a
scientific case for human evolution, but this was simultaneously an effort to
advance evolutionism. Huxley set his scientific expositions within a narra-
tive that collapsed the history of civilization back into natural history. Evo-
lution thus took on the same kind of double signification frequently given
to natural objects in myth; his evolutionary language retained its scientific
meaning by referencing the empirical data of natural history, but it also
symbolized the scientific character of human progress. The latter of these
two features is especially evident in the notable way that Huxley draws upon
the familiar vocabulary of Baconian myth—much as John Angus Campbell
has recognized in Darwin's own appropriations of England's natural theol-
ogy tradition.
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