Part 4

It was not every one who could dare to range so far and wide as Huxley did from the original line of investigation he had taken up. Friends warned him against what appeared to be a scattering of his energies. If he devoted himself to that morphology of the Invertebrates in which his new and illuminating conceptions had promptly earned the Royal Medal, he would easily be the first in his field. But what he did was in great part of set purpose. He was no mere collector of specimens, no mere describer of species. He sought the living processes which determined natural groups; the theories he formed needed verification in various directions. These excursions from the primary line of research were of great value in broadening the basis of his knowledge. He also deliberately set aside the years 1854-60 as a period in which to make himself master of the branches of science cognate to his own, so that he should be ready for any special pursuits in any of them. For he did not know what was to be his task after the work that had fallen to him, not of his own choice, at the School of Mines. He was to ground himself in each department by monographic work, and by 1860 might fairly look forward to fifteen or twenty years of "Meisterjahre," when, with the comprehensive views arising from such training, it should be possible to give a new and healthier direction to all biological science. Meanwhile, opportunities must be seized at the risk of a reputation for desultoriness.

But the irony of circumstances diverted much of his energy into yet more diverse fields. When Sir Henry de la Beche first offered him the posts of Palæontologist and Lecturer on Natural History vacated by Professor Forbes, he says:--

I refused the former point blank, and accepted the latter only provisionally, telling Sir Henry that I did not care for fossils, and that I should give up Natural History as soon as I could get a physiological post. But I held the office for thirty-one years, and a large part of my work has been palæontological.

Palæontology was his business, and he became a Master in it also, with the result that he forged himself a mighty weapon for use in the struggle over the Origin of Species.

In one of his later Essays he compares the study of human physiology to the Atlantic Ocean:--

Like the Atlantic between the Old and the New Worlds, its waves wash the shores of the two worlds of matter and of mind; its tributary streams flow from both; through its waters, as yet unfurrowed by the keel of any Columbus, lies the road, if such there be, from the one to the other; far away from that North-West Passage of mere speculation in which so many brave souls have been helplessly frozen up.

Such was the spirit in which, after his long day's work, he added to his labours in physical science a search in another, and to his notion a cognate province of thought and speculation. Many a sleepless night in these years the candle was lighted beside his bed, and for a couple of hours after midnight he would devour works on philosophy--English, German, and French, and occasionally Latin. To a mind at once constructive and intensely critical of unsound construction he added a quality possessed by few professed philosophers--a large knowledge of the workings of life, of the human thinking machine, in addition to various other branches of physical science. As he put it, the laboratory is the forecourt to the temple of philosophy. For the method of the laboratory is but the strict application of the one sound and fruitful mode of reasoning--the method of verification by experiment. Evidence must be tested before being trusted. The first duty of such a method is to question in order to find good reason; Goethe's "tätige Skepsis," a scepticism or questioning which seeks to overcome itself by finding good standing-ground beyond. Authority as such is nothing till verified anew. The creeds of ancient sages, the dogmas of more modern date, must equally bear the light of widening knowledge and the tests that prove the gold or clay of their foundations, the stability of the successive steps by which they proceed.

In all this reading Huxley found nothing to shake what he had learnt long before from Hamilton--the limits set to human knowledge and the impossibility of attaining to the ultimate reality behind the phenomena presented to our cognition. The problems of philosophy, set forth with unsurpassed clearness for all who will read in our great English writers, were not solved by soaring into intellectual mists. To those who declared they had attained this ultimate knowledge by their own inner light or through an alleged revelation in historical experience, the question remained to be put: How do you verify your assertion? Is the historical evidence on which you build trustworthy? And if in certain departments this evidence is clearly untenable, what guarantee have you that in other departments evidence of similar character is tenable? The fine-spun abstractions of the Platonists and their kin, unchecked by a natural science which had not yet the appliances necessary for its growth; the orthodoxies of the various churches, so singularly differentiated in the course of development from the simplicity of their nominal founder--these were based upon assumptions for which the seeker after reasoned evidence could find no valid support. Ten years before he coined the word "Agnostic" to label his attitude towards the unproved, whether likely or unlikely, in contradistinction to the Gnostics, who professed to "know" from within apart from external proof, Huxley described the Agnostic position he had already reached--the position of suspending judgment where actual proof is not possible; the attitude of mind which regards the words "I believe" as a momentous assertion, not to be uttered on incomplete grounds. Writing to Charles Kingsley in 1860, he says:--

I neither deny nor affirm the immortality of man. I see no reason for believing in it; but, on the other hand, I have no means of disproving it.

Pray understand that I have no à priori objections to the doctrine. No man who has to deal daily and hourly with nature can trouble himself about à priori difficulties. Give me such evidence as would justify me in believing anything else, and I will believe that. Why should I not? It is not half so wonderful as the conservation of force, or the indestructibility of matter. Whoso clearly appreciates all that is implied in the falling of a stone can have no difficulty about any doctrine simply on account of its marvellousness. But the longer I live the more obvious it is to me that the most sacred act of a man's life is to say and to feel, "I believe such and such to be true." All the greatest rewards, and all the heaviest penalties of existence, cling about that act. The universe is one and the same throughout; and if the condition of my success in unravelling some little difficulty of anatomy or physiology is that I shall rigorously refuse to put faith in that which does not rest on sufficient evidence, I cannot believe that the great mysteries of existence will be laid open to me on other terms. It is of no use to talk to me of analogies and probabilities. I know what I mean when I say I believe in the law of the inverse square, and I will not rest my life and my hopes upon weaker convictions. I dare not if I would.

From such a point of view intellectual veracity takes on a moral aspect; indeed, it is a pillar of morality. Disregard of it has led to incalculable social wrong and individual suffering, oppressions and persecutions, unprogressive obscurantism, joined with perverted ideals and intellectual arrest. "Ecrasez l'infâme," cried the reforming Voltaire; his "infamous" was very much this perverting influence, exaggerated and armed with power, which had made the great organization of the Roman Church in his time a monstrous instrument of autocratic tradition, cruel, rapacious, blindly intolerant, jealous of light and liberty. In England the growth of political liberty had deprived the darkest lights of the Church of almost all power for active interference in the administration of the State, though the pressure of traditionalism exercised itself less crudely, if scarce less surely, in the Universities, the Press, religious opinion, and the army of conventional respectability. So strong was it in social influence that a man, openly professing to make a guide of his reason instead of his parson, was liable to be pushed outside the pale.

VERACITY AND AGNOSTICISM

One of the most ticklish of all subjects to handle at this period was the position of the human species in zoological classification. "It was a burning question in the sense that those who touched it were almost certain to burn their fingers severely." In the fifties Sir William Lawrence had been well-nigh ostracized for his book On Man, "which now might be read in a Sunday-school without surprising anybody." When Huxley submitted the proofs of Man's Place in Nature to "a competent anatomist, and good friend of his," asking him, if he could, to point out any errors of fact, the friend--it was Lawrence himself--declared he could find none, but gave an earnest warning as to the consequences of publication. Here was one of the cases where Huxley's firm resolution applied--to speak out if necessary, regardless of consequences; indeed, he felt sure that all the evil things prophesied would not be so painful to him as the giving up that which he had resolved to do upon grounds which he conceived to be right. As he wrote later (in 1876):--

It seemed to me that a man of science has no raison d'être at all unless he is willing to face much greater risks than these for the sake of that which he believes to be true; and further, that to a man of science such risks do not count for much--they are by no means so serious as they are to a man of letters, for example.

The book was published, and the friend's forecast was amply justified.

The Boreas of criticism blew his hardest blasts of misrepresentation and ridicule for some years, and I was even as one of the wicked. Indeed, it surprises me at times to think how any one who had sunk so low could since have emerged into, at any rate, relative respectability. Personally, like the non-corvine personages in the Ingoldsby legend, I did not feel "one penny the worse." Translated into several languages, the book reached a wider public than I had ever hoped for; being largely helped, I imagine, by the Ernulphine advertisements to which I referred. It has had the honour of being freely utilized without acknowledgment by writers of repute; and, finally, it achieved the fate, which is the euthanasia of a scientific work, of being enclosed among the rubble of the foundations of later knowledge, and forgotten.

To my observation, human nature has not sensibly changed during the last thirty years. I doubt not that there are truths as plainly obvious, and as generally denied, as those contained in Man's Place in Nature, now awaiting enunciation. If there is a young man of the present generation who has taken as much trouble as I did to assure himself that they are truths, let him come out with them, without troubling his head about the barking of the dogs of St. Ernulphus. Veritas praevalebit--some day; and even if she does not prevail in his time, he himself will be all the better and wiser for having tried to help her. And let him recollect that such great reward is full payment for all his labour and pains.

To speak out thus was one side of his passion for veracity. When it was a matter of demonstrable truth, he refused to be intimidated by great names. Already, in his Croonian lecture of 1858, "On the Theory of the Vertebrate Skull," he had challenged, and by direct morphological investigation overthrown, the theory of Oken, adopted and enlarged upon by Owen, that the adult skull is a modified vertebral column. Again, the great name of Owen, that jealous king of the anatomical world, had in 1857 supported the assertion, so contrary to the investigations of Huxley himself and of other anatomists, that certain anatomical features of the brain are peculiar to the genus Homo, and are a ground for placing that genus separately from all other mammals--in a division, Archencephala, apart from and superior to the rest. Huxley thereupon re-investigated the whole question, and soon satisfied himself that these structures were not peculiar to man, but are common to all the higher and many of the lower apes. This led him to study the whole question of the structural relations of man to the next lower existing forms. Without embarking on controversy, he embodied his conclusions in his teaching.

Thus, in 1860, he was well prepared to follow up Darwin's words in the Origin of Species, "Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history," and to furnish proofs in the field of Development and Vertebrate Anatomy, which were not among Darwin's many specialities.

When Owen, at the Oxford meeting of the British Association, repeated his former assertions, he publicly took up the challenge. On the technical side, a series of dissections undertaken by himself, Rolleston, and Flower displayed the structures for all to see; on the popular side, Huxley delivered in 1860 a course of public lectures which were the basis of his book, Man's Place in Nature, above mentioned.

Here the principle is actively exemplified: speak out fearlessly at the right moment to strike down that which is demonstrably false. It is the counterpart to the other aspect of veracity which will not say "I believe" to an unverified assertion. These two aspects of the same principle, as has been seen, developed hand in hand in his early career; but it was the active challenge to ill-based authority which, by its courage, not to say audacity, first attracted public notice and public abuse. The other, the apparently negative aspect, came into general notice only after 1869. Its very reserves, however, resting on a statement of reasons for finding the testimony to certain doctrines insufficient, had long provoked assaults from the upholders of these doctrines, which made no less call upon his courage and endurance. As a philosophic position, however, it was not formally and publicly defined until, in the debates of the Metaphysical Society founded in that year, he invented for himself the label of Agnostic. The Society was composed of distinguished men, representing almost every shade of opinion and intellectual occupation; University professors, statesmen, lawyers, bishops and deans, a Cardinal, a poet; men of science and men of letters; Anglicans, Roman Catholics, Unitarians, Positivists, Freethinkers.

The story is told in his article on "Agnosticism," written in 1889 (Collected Essays, v, 237). After describing how it came about that his mind "steadily gravitated towards the conclusions of Hume and Kant," so well stated by the latter as follows:--

The greatest and perhaps the sole use of all philosophy of pure reason is, after all, merely negative, since it serves not as an organon for the enlargement (of knowledge), but as a discipline for its delimitation; and, instead of discovering truth, has only the modest merit of preventing error--

he proceeds:--

When I reached intellectual maturity and began to ask myself whether I was an atheist, a theist, or a pantheist; a materialist or an idealist; a Christian or a freethinker; I found that the more I learned and reflected the less ready was the answer, until, at last, I came to the conclusion that I had neither art nor part with any of these denominations except the last. The one thing in which most of these good people were agreed was the one thing in which I differed from them. They were quite sure they had attained a certain "gnosis"--had, more or less successfully, solved the problem of existence; while I was quite sure I had not, and had a pretty strong conviction that the problem was insoluble. And, with Hume and Kant on my side, I could not think myself presumptuous in holding fast by that opinion....

This was my situation when I had the good fortune to find a place among the members of that remarkable confraternity of antagonists, long since deceased, but of green and pious memory, the Metaphysical Society. Every variety of philosophical and theological opinion was represented there, and expressed itself with entire openness; most of my colleagues were -ists of one sort or another; and, however kind and friendly they might be, I, the man without a rag of a label to cover himself with, could not fail to have some of the uneasy feelings which must have beset the historical fox when, after leaving the trap in which his tail remained, he presented himself to his normally elongated companions. So I took thought, and invented what I conceived to be the appropriate title of "Agnostic." It came into my head as suggestively antithetic to the "Gnostic" of Church history, who professed to know so much about the very things of which I was ignorant; and I took the earliest opportunity of parading it at our Society to show that I, too, had a tail like the other foxes. To my great satisfaction, the term took; and when the Spectator had stood godfather to it, any suspicion in the minds of respectable people that a knowledge of its parentage might have awakened was, of course, completely lulled.

Of his share in the debates the late Prof. Henry Sidgwick gives the following account:--

There were several members of the Society with whose philosophical views I had, on the whole, more sympathy; but there was certainly no one to whom I found it more pleasant and more instructive to listen. Indeed, I soon came to the conclusion that there was only one other member of our Society who could be placed on a par with him as a debater, on the subjects discussed at our meetings; and that was, curiously enough, a man of the most diametrically opposed opinion--W. G. Ward, the well-known advocate of Ultramontanism. Ward was by training, and perhaps by nature, more of a dialectician; but your father was unrivalled in the clearness, precision, succinctness, and point of his statements, in his complete and ready grasp of his own system of philosophical thought, and the quickness and versatility with which his thought at once assumed the right attitude of defence against any argument coming from any quarter. I used to think that while others of us could perhaps find, on the spur of the moment, an answer more or less effective to some unexpected attack, your father seemed always able to find the answer--I mean the answer that it was reasonable to give, consistently with his general view, and much the same answer that he would have given if he had been allowed the fullest time for deliberation.