"But it will be said that I forget the beauty and the human interest, which appertain to classical studies. To this I reply that it is only a very strong man who can appreciate the charms of landscape as he is toiling up a steep hill, along a bad road. What with short-windedness, stones, nits, and a pervading sense of the wisdom of rest and be thankful, most of us have little enough sense of the beautiful under these circumstances. The ordinary schoolboy is precisely in this case. He finds Parnassus uncommonly steep, and there is no chance of his having much time or inclination to look about him till he gets to the top. And nine times out of ten he does not get to the top."

The last example we shall take comes from a speech made after dinner at a much later period of his life. The occasion was a complimentary dinner to the editor of the English scientific periodical Nature, which had been for long the leading semi-popular journal of English science. Huxley, in proposing the health of the editor, declared that he did not quite know how to say what he wanted to say, but that he would explain by a story.

"A poor woman," he said, "was brought into one of our hospitals in a shockingly battered condition. When her wounds had been cleaned and sewn, and when the care of the surgeons had restored her to comparative comfort, someone said to her, 'I am afraid your husband has been knocking you about.' 'What!' she said, 'my Jim bash me? no it worn't by him; he's always been more like a friend to me than a husband.' That," went on Huxley, "is what I wish to say about our guest of to-night. In all our intercourse with him he has been more like a friend to us than an editor."

It is impossible to make a real distinction between the essays and the addresses of Huxley. Many of the most important of his addresses, as for instance his Romanes lecture on "Evolution and Ethics," were written and printed before he delivered them; most of them were carefully prepared, and revised and printed after delivery. It is therefore not remarkable to find a close resemblance in matter and manner between what was originally spoken and what was published without a viva voce delivery. Everything that may be said of the one set applies with an equal fitness to the other set. There are many who assert with confidence that Huxley is one of the great masters of English, and although an examination of this opinion involves discussion of the elusive quality termed "style," it is necessary to attempt it.

In that totality which consists of an essay or of a printed address, and of which we are, most of us, ready to discuss the style, there are at least three separable elements, each contributing after its kind to the effect on our minds. When the general effect is to throw us into a state of pleasure, it is our habit to qualify the style with an adjective of praise, selecting the adjective according to the degree of restraint or of enthusiasm with which we are accustomed to express our emotions; when the general effect is to throw us into a condition of boredom or of distaste, we make a corresponding choice of appropriate adjectives. When we wish to be specially critical we pass a little way beyond an empirical judgment by pleasure or annoyance and take into account the degree of harmony between matter and manner. In such a frame of mind we discount the pleasure obtained from verbal quips, if these occur in a grave exposition, or that received from solemn and stately harmonies of language if these be employed on insignificant trifles. In a condition of unusual critical exaltation we may even admit an excellence of language and phrasing though these have as their contents ideas which we dislike, or press towards conclusions from which we dissent. But if we desire to make an exact appreciation of literary style, it is requisite to examine separately the three elements which contribute to the effect produced on us by any written work. These three elements are the words or raw materials employed, the building of words into sentences and of sentences into paragraphs, which may be designated as the architectural work, and, finally, the ideas conveyed, that is to say, the actual object of the writing.

Huxley was a wide and omnivorous reader, and so had an unusually large fund of words at his disposal. His writings abound with quotations and allusions taken from the best English authors, and he had a profound and practical belief in the advantage to be gained from the reading of English. "If a man," he wrote, "cannot get literary culture out of his Bible, and Chaucer, and Shakespeare, and Milton, and Hobbes, and Bishop Berkeley, to mention only a few of our illustrious writers—I say, if he cannot get it out of these writers, he cannot get it out of anything." He had at least a fair knowledge of Greek in the original, and a very wide acquaintance with Greek phrasing and Greek ideas derived from a study of Greek authors in English versions. He had an unusual knowledge of Latin, both of the classical writers and of the early Church fathers and mediaeval writers on science and metaphysics. French and German, the two foreign languages which are a necessary part of the mental equipment of an English-speaking man of science, were familiar to him. Finally, he had of necessity the wide and varied vocabulary of the natural and technical sciences at his disposal. From these varied sources, Huxley had a fund of words, a store of the raw material for expressing ideas, very much greater and more varied than that in the possession of most writers. You will find in his writings abundant and omnipresent evidence of the enormous wealth of verbal material ready for the ideas he wished to set forth: a Greek phrase, a German phrase, a Latin or French phrase, or a group of words borrowed from one of our own great writers always seemed to await his wish. General Booth's scheme for elevating the masses by cymbals and dogma was "corybantic Christianity"; to explain what he thought was the Catholic attitude to the doctrine of evolution, he said it would have been called damnabilis by Father Suarez, and that he would have meant "not that it was to be damned, but that it was an active principle capable of damning." Huxley was like a builder who did not limit himself while he was constructing a house to the ordinary materials from the most convenient local quarry, but who collected endlessly from all the quarries and brickfields of the world, and brought to his heaps curiously wrought stones taken from a thousand old buildings. The swift choice from such a varied material gave an ease and appearance of natural growth to his work; it produced many surprising and delightful combinations, and it never sacrificed convenience of expression to exigencies of the materials for expression. On the other hand, Huxley lacked the sedulous concern for words themselves as things valuable and delightful; the delight of the craftsman in his tools; the dainty and respectful tribute paid to the words themselves; in fine, he took little pleasure in words themselves and used them as counters rather than as coins. Careful reflection and examination will make it plain that the pleasure to be got from Huxley's style is not due in any large measure to his choice and handling of words. There is no evidence that he deliberately and fastidiously preferred one word to another, that he took delight in the savour of individual words, in the placing of plain words in a context to make them sparkle, in the avoidance of some, in the deliberate preference of other words,—in fact, in all the conscious tricks and graces that distinguish the lover of words from their mere user.

A close examination discovers a similar absence from Huxley's work of the second contributory to the total effect produced by written words. Anything that may be said about absence of artistry in the use of words, may be said as to absence of artistry in building of the words into sentences, of the sentences into paragraphs and pages. In the first place, actual infelicities of sentence-building are frequent. Clause is piled on clause, qualifying phrases are interpolated, the easy devices of dashes and repetitions are employed wherever convenience suggests them. It is striking to find how infrequent is the occurrence of passages marked in any way by sonorous rhythm or by the charm of a measured proportion. The purple passages themselves, those which linger in the memory and to which the reader turns back, linger by their sense and not by their sound. For indeed the truth of the matter is that Huxley's style was a style of ideas and not of words and sentences. The more closely you analyse his pages the more certainly you find that the secret of the effect produced on you lies in the gradual development of the precise and logical ideas he wished to convey, in the brilliant accumulation of argument upon argument, in the logical subordination of details to the whole, in fact, in the arts of the convinced, positive, and logical thinker, who knew exactly what he meant you to know and who set about telling you it with the least possible concern for the words he used or for the sentences into which he formed his words. The ideas and their ordering are the root and the branches, the beginning and the end of his style. To put it in another way: it would be extremely easy to translate any of Huxley's writings into French or German, and they would lose extremely little of the personal flavour of their author. The present writer has just been reading French translations of Huxley's Physiography and Crayfish, made at different times by different translators. At first reading it seems almost miraculous how identically the effect produced by the original is reproduced by the French rendering, but the secret is really no secret at all. Huxley produced his effects by the ordering of his ideas and not by the ordering of his words. From the technical point of view of literary craftsmanship, he cannot be assigned a high place; he is one of our great English writers, but he is not a great writer of English.



CHAPTER XIII

THE OPPONENT OF MATERIALISM

Science and Metaphysics—Berkeley, Hume, and Hobbes—Existence of Matter and Mind—Descartes's Contribution—Materialism and Idealism—Criticism of Materialism—Berkeley's Idealism—Criticism of Idealism—Empirical Idealism—Materialism as opposed to Supernaturalism—Mind and Brain—Origin of Life—Teleology, Chance, and the Argument from Design.

The prosecution of independent thinking in any branch of knowledge leads to the ultimate problems of philosophy. The mathematician cannot ponder over the meaning of his figures, the chemist that of his reactions, the biologist that of his tissues and cells, the psychologist that of sensations and conceptions, without being tempted from the comparatively secure ground of observations and the arrangement of observations into the perilous regions of metaphysics. Most scientific men return quickly, repelled and perhaps a little scared by the baffling confusion of that windy region of thought where no rules of logic seem incontrovertible, no conclusions tenable, and no discussions profitable. Huxley, however, not only entered into metaphysical questions with enthusiasm, but gave a great deal of time to the study of some of the great metaphysical writers. His views are to be found scattered through very many of his ordinary scientific writings, but are specially set forth in a volume on Hume, which he wrote for Mr. John Morley's series, English Men of Letters, and in essays on Berkeley and on Descartes, all of which are republished in the Collected Essays. He contrived to preserve, in the most abstrusely philosophical of these writings, a simplicity and clarity which, although they have not commended him to professional metaphysicians, make his attitude to the problems of metaphysics extremely intelligible. The greatest barrier and cause of confusion to the novice in metaphysics is that the writings of most of the great authorities are overburdened by their great knowledge of the history of philosophy. Huxley, in a characteristic piece of "parting advice" in the preface to his work on Hume attacked this confusion between the history of a subject and the subject itself.

"If it is your desire," he wrote, "to discourse fluently and learnedly about philosophical questions, begin with the Ionians and work steadily through to the latest new speculative treatise. If you have a good memory and a fair knowledge of Greek, Latin, French, and German, three or four years spent in this way should enable you to attain your object. If, on the contrary, you are animated by the much rarer desire for real knowledge; if you want to get a clear conception of the deepest problems set before the intellect of man, there is no need, so far as I can see, for you to go beyond the limits of the English tongue. Indeed, if you are pressed for time, three English authors will suffice, namely, Berkeley, Hume, and Hobbes."

The first and perhaps the greatest problem in metaphysics can be put very shortly. What is the reality behind the apparent universe of matter and mind we see around us? Or, rather, what do we know of that reality? To the uninitiated in philosophical thinking it seems sufficiently plain that there are two entities, body and soul in man, matter and mind in the whole universe; and various types of intelligent dogmatists, ranging from the sturdy if somewhat stupid shrewdness of Dr. Johnson to the agile casuistry of Catholic metaphysicians, have supported this simple verdict of "common sense." Trouble begins, however, with any attempt to analyse the relations between what we call "matter" and what we call "mind." It appears, for instance, that what we call matter we only know in terms of mind. In an essay on Descartes's Discourse on Method, Huxley explains this by simple examples.

"I take up a marble and I find it to be a red, round, hard, single body. We call the redness, the roundness, the hardness and the singleness, 'qualities' of the marble; and it sounds, at first, the height of absurdity to say that all these qualities are modes of our own consciousness, which cannot even be conceived to exist in the marble. But consider the redness, to begin with. How does the sensation of redness arise? The waves of a certain very attenuated matter, the particles of which are vibrating with vast rapidity, but with very different velocities, strike upon the marble, and those which vibrate with one particular velocity are thrown off from its surface in all directions. The optical apparatus of the eye gathers some of these together, and gives them such a course that they impinge upon the surface of the retina, which is a singularly delicate apparatus connected with the terminations of the fibres of the optic nerve. The impulses of the attenuated matter, or ether, affect this apparatus and the fibres of the optic nerve in a certain way; and the change in the fibres of the optic nerve produces yet other changes in the brain; and these, in some fashion unknown to us, give rise to the feeling, or consciousness, of redness. If the marble could remain unchanged, and either the vibrations of the ether, or the nature of the retina, could be altered, the marble would seem not red, but some other colour. There are many people who are what are called colour-blind, being unable to distinguish one colour from another. Such an one might declare our marble to be green; and he would be quite as right in saying that it is green as we are in declaring it to be red. But then, as the marble itself cannot be both green and red, at the same time, this shews that the quality redness must be in our consciousness and not in the marble."

In similar fashion he shewed that the hardness, roundness, and even the singleness of the marble were, so far as we know, states of our consciousness and not in the marble. The argument is capable of application to all that we call matter, and it thus appears, on analysis, that what we know of matter is simply a series of states of our consciousness, or mind. In similar fashion, it turns out that what we call mind is, so far as practical experience goes, always associated with and dependent on what we call matter. We have no direct knowledge of thinking without a brain, or of consciousness without a body. Alterations and changes in matter, as for instance in the tissues and nutrition of the body, are, so far as our experience goes, inseparably associated with mental operations. In the animal kingdom we see the development of the mind creeping slowly after the development of the material nervous system, until, in man, the most complex mind and most complex consciousness of which we have knowledge accompany the most complex body and brain.

Two great rival solutions to this fundamental problem are Materialism and Idealism. Materialism supposes that what we call matter is the real substance of the universe, and that mind is merely one of the forms of its activity. The advance of physical science has done much to make the materialistic hypothesis more plausible. When matter was believed to be inert, the mere vehicle or theatre of forces, materialism remained a singularly crude and unsatisfying position. But now that science has shewn all that we call matter—the most solid metals and the most attenuated vapours, the most stable and resisting inorganic bodies, and the unstable tissues of living bodies—to be alike in restless, orderly motion, to be, in fact, motion itself and not the thing moved, to be changeable but indestructible, passing through phases but eternal, there seems less difficulty in assuming it to be the ultimate reality, and mind and consciousness to be its most highly specialised qualities. Huxley, while stating this view plainly enough, refused to accept it as a legitimate conclusion from the facts.

"For anything that may be proved to the contrary, there may be a real something which is the cause of all our impressions; that sensations, though not likenesses, are symbols of that something; and that the part of that something, which we call the nervous system, is an apparatus for supplying us with a sort of algebra of fact, based on these symbols. A brain may be the machinery by which the material universe becomes conscious of itself. But it is important to notice that, even if this conception of the uuiverse and of the relation of consciousness to its other components should be true, we should, nevertheless, be still bound by the limits of thought, still unable to refute the arguments of pure idealism. The more completely the materialistic position is admitted, the easier it is to show that the idealistic position is unassailable, if the idealist confines himself within the limits of positive knowledge."

However we attempt to form what philosophers call "ejects," to imagine that what is really in our consciousness is really the world outside ourselves, these ejects remain mere phenomena of our minds. Matter itself and its changes may, in the long run, be but modes of motion, but "our knowledge of motion is nothing but that of a change in the place and order of our sensations; just as our knowledge of matter is restricted to those feelings of which we assume it to be the cause." Huxley's exact position in regard to materialism is most plain in his expositions of the writings of Berkeley, with whom began in England the greatest movement towards an idealistic philosophy.

"Berkeley faced the problem boldly. He said to the materialists: 'You tell me that all the phenomena of nature are resolvable into matter and its affections. I assent to your statement, and now I put to you the further question, What is matter? In answering this question you shall be bound by your own conditions; and I demand, in the terms of the Cartesian axiom, that you in turn give your assent only to such conclusions as are perfectly clear and obvious.'"

Huxley then goes on to state the general lines of the arguments by which Berkeley arrived at the apparently paradoxical conclusion "that all the choir of heaven and furniture of the earth—in a word, all those bodies which compose the mighty frame of the world," have an existence only so far as they are in a perceiving mind. And he proceeds at length to explain the immense importance of the truths underlying Berkeley's position.

"The key to all philosophy lies in the clear apprehension of Berkeley's problem—which is neither more nor less than one of the shapes of the greatest of all questions, 'What are the limits of our faculties?' And it is worth any amount of trouble to comprehend the exact nature of the argument by which Berkeley arrived at his results, and to know by one's own knowledge the great truth which he discovered—that the honest and rigorous following up of the argument which leads us to materialism inevitably carries us beyond it."

Huxley, however, while he opposed a materialistic explanation of the universe with the strength of exposition and acute reasoning at his disposal, did not pass directly into the other camp and become a pure idealist.

"Granting the premisses," he wrote, "I do not see any escape from Berkeley's conclusion, that the substance of matter is a metaphysical unknown quantity, of the existence of which there is no proof. What Berkeley does not seem to have so clearly perceived is that the non-existence of a substance of mind is equally arguable; and that the result of the impartial application of his reasonings is the reduction of the all to co-existences and sequences of phenomena, beneath and beyond which there is nothing cognoscible."

Hume had written: "What we call a mind is nothing but a heap or collection of different perceptions, united together by certain relations, and supposed, though falsely, to be endowed with a perfect simplicity and identity." Here was mind rejected for the same negative reasons as matter, and Huxley was as ready to point out that while we can know nothing of the

"substance of the thinking thing, we go beyond legitimate reasoning if we therefore deny its existence." ... "Hume may be right or wrong, but the most he or anyone else can prove in favour of his conclusions is, that we know nothing more of the mind than that it is a series of perceptions. Whether there is something in the mind that lies beyond the reach of observation, or whether perceptions themselves are the products of something which can be observed and which is not mind, are questions which can in no wise be settled by direct observation."

In another passage he writes:

"To sum up. If the materialist affirms that the universe and all its phenomena are resolvable into matter and motion, Berkeley replies, True; but what you call matter and motion are known to us only as forms of consciousness; their being is to be conceived or known; and the existence of a state of consciousness, apart from a thinking mind, is a contradiction in terms. I conceive that this reasoning is irrefragable. And therefore, if I were obliged to choose between absolute materialism and absolute idealism, I should feel compelled to accept the latter alternative. Indeed, upon this point Locke does, practically, go as far in the direction of idealism as Berkeley, when he admits that the 'simple ideas which we receive from sensation and reflection are the boundaries of our thoughts, beyond which the mind, whatever efforts it would make, is not able to advance one jot.'"

Locke went further, and Huxley agreed with him. He declared that the mind cannot "make any discoveries when it would pry into the nature and hidden cause of these ideas." We must, in fact, definitely reject what we know as matter as the absolute reality of the universe, for it becomes very plain that what we call matter we know merely as affections of our own consciousness. In a sense, then, so far as it is opposed to materialism, idealism, according to Huxley, must be the philosophical position of a scientific man. But the idealism is not the absolute idealism of Berkeley, as we have no logical right to deny or to affirm the existence of absolute matter or of absolute mind. The real truth of the philosophy of science lies in a separation between metaphysical theory and actual pursuits. In ultimate philosophical theory it is impossible to rest content with a plain natural conception of the universe. When any conception of matter, or of its affections, is pushed as far as analysis can take us, what we know resolves itself into affections of mind, into what without metaphysical finesse may be called ideas. But this empirical idealism must be taken positively as being merely the limits of our knowledge, and it must carry with it neither an undue exaltation of mind nor an undue depreciation of matter.

"The Platonic philosophy is probably the grandest example of the unscientific use of the imagination extant; and it would be hard to estimate the amount of detriment to clear thinking effected, directly and indirectly, by the theory of ideas, on the one hand, and by the unfortunate doctrine of the baseness of matter, on the other."

Materialism was dismissed by Huxley as being an inadequate philosophical explanation of the universe, and as being based on a logical delusion. There remains, however, a practical application of the word in which the conceptions it involves are almost an inevitable part of science, and which was strenuously urged by Huxley. In the earlier days of the world and of science almost all the phenomena of nature were regarded as random or wilful displays of living intelligence. The earth itself and the sun, the moon, and the stars were endowed with life; legions of unseen intelligences ruled the operations of nature, and although these might be bribed or threatened, pleased or made angry, their actions were regarded as beyond prediction or control. The procession of the seasons, the routine of day and night, the placid appeasement of the rains, the devastating roar of storms, the shining of the rainbow, the bubbling of springs, the terrors of famine and pestilence; all these—the varying environment which makes or mars human life—were regarded as inevitable and capricious. The whole progress of physical science has been attended with a gradual elimination of these supernatural agencies and with a continual replacement of them by conceptions of physical sequence.

"In singular contrast with natural knowledge, the acquaintance of mankind with the supernatural appears the more exact, and the influence of supernatural doctrine on conduct the greater, the further we go back in time and the lower the stage of civilisation submitted to investigation. Historically, indeed, there would seem to be an inverse relation between supernatural and natural knowledge. As the latter has widened, gained in precision and trustworthiness, so has the former shrunk, grown vague and questionable; as the one has more and more filled the sphere of action, so has the other retreated into the region of meditation, or vanished behind the screen of mere verbal recognition. Whether this difference of the fortunes of Naturalism and Supernaturalism is an indication of the progress, or of the regress of humanity, of a fall from or an advance towards the higher life, is a matter of opinion. The point to which I wish to direct attention is that the difference exists and is making itself felt. Men are growing seriously alive to the fact that the historical evolution of humanity, which is generally, and I venture to think, not unreasonably, regarded as progress, has been and is being accompanied by a co-ordinate elimination of the supernatural from its originally large occupation of men's thought."

Every stage in this long process, every new attempt to place physical phenomena in a chain of direct causation has been denounced as dangerous and degrading materialism, and in this sense Huxley was not only an adherent but one of the foremost champions of materialism. As everyone knows, some of the greatest advances in this process of co-ordinating physical phenomena were made during Huxley's life; and his vigorous onslaughts on those who tried to thwart all attempts at material explanations in favour of unknown agencies made him specially open to abusive criticism. The battle was almost invariably between those who had not special knowledge and those in possession of it, and it occurred in practically the whole field of science, but particularly in the biological sciences. A single example will serve to shew what is meant by materialism in this sense and the attitude of Huxley to it. The study of the human mind naturally has attracted the attention of thinkers almost since the beginning of philosophy, but until this century, with a few crude exceptions, it has been conducted entirely apart from anatomy and physiology. Advances in these physical sciences, however, have changed that, and the modern psychologist has to begin by being a physiologist and anatomist.

"Surely no one who is cognisant of the facts of the case, nowadays, doubts that the roots of psychology lie in the physiology of the nervous system. What we call the operations of the mind are the functions of the brain, and the materials of consciousness are products of cerebral activity. Cabanis may have made use of crude and misleading phraseology when he said that the brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile; but the conception which that much-abused phrase embodies is, nevertheless, far more consistent with fact than the popular notion that the mind is a metaphysical entity seated in the head, but as independent of the brain as a telegraph operator is of his instrument. It is hardly necessary to point out that the doctrine just laid down is what is commonly called materialism. I am not sure that the adjective 'crass,' which appears to have a special charm for rhetorical sciolists, would not be applied to it. But it is, nevertheless, true that the doctrine contains nothing inconsistent with the purest idealism."

The whole doctrine of evolution is similarly a materialistic account of natural phenomena, in the popular and not the philosophical meaning of the term. But even within this popular meaning, it is extremely necessary to have an exact conception of the limits within which Huxley was materialistic. Take for instance the question of the origin of life. It would be one of the greatest achievements of physical science could it shew that life was not inco-ordinate with non-living physical phenomena, but was a special case of them. Huxley knew that this advance had not yet been made.

"It may be that, by-and-by, philosophers will discover some higher laws of which the facts of life are particular cases—very possibly they will find out some bond between physico-chemical phenomena on the one hand, and vital phenomena on the other. At present, however, we assuredly know of none; and I think we shall exercise a wise humility in confessing that, for us at least, this successive assumption of different states (external conditions remaining the same)—this spontaneity of action—if I may use a term which implies more than I would be answerable for—which constitutes so vast and plain a practical distinction between living bodies and those which do not live, is an ultimate fact; indicating as such, the existence of a broad line of demarcation between the subject matter of biological and of all other science."

In another passage he wrote:

"Looking back through the prodigious vista of the past I find no record of the commencement of life, and therefore I am devoid of any means of forming a definite conclusion as to the conditions of its appearance. Belief, in the scientific sense of the word, is a serious matter, and needs strong foundations. To say, therefore, in the admitted absence of evidence, that I have any belief as to the mode in which the existing forms of life have originated, would be using words in a wrong sense. But expectation is permissible where belief is not; and if it were given me to look beyond the abyss of geologically recorded time to the still more remote period when the earth was passing through physical and chemical conditions which it can no more see again than a man can recall his infancy, I should expect to be a witness of the evolution of living protoplasm from non-living matter. I should expect to see it appear under forms of great simplicity, endowed, like existing fungi, with the power of determining the formation of new protoplasm from such matters as ammonium carbonates, oxalates, and tartrates, alkaline and earthy phosphates, and water, without the aid of light. That is the expectation to which analogical reasoning leads me, but I beg you once more to recollect that I have no right to call my opinion anything but an act of philosophical faith."

Since these words were written the reasons for Huxley's "philosophic faith" have been strengthened by later discoveries, and perhaps a majority of biologists would take the view that except for practical purposes there is no sound reason for placing living and inorganic aggregations of matter in totally different categories. But even if the main outline of the theory of evolution were proved beyond the possibility of doubt, if we could trace existing plants and animals backwards with the accuracy of a genealogist and find that they had been developed, under purely physical "laws" from a few simple forms, and if we could understand exactly how these few simple forms of living matter took origin from non-living matter, we would not, if we followed Huxley, be able to rest in a purely materialistic position. As he, in different words, repeatedly said:

"It is very desirable to remember that evolution is not an explanation of the cosmos, but merely a generalised statement of the method and results of that process. And, further, that, if there is any proof that the cosmic process was set going by any agent, then that agent will be the creator of it and of all its products, although supernatural intervention may remain strictly excluded from its further course."

The doctrine of evolution was, for him, no attempt to reinstate the "old pagan goddess, Chance." Darwin had again and again explained, and Huxley again and again had called attention to the explanation, that when words like "chance" and "spontaneous" were used, no more was intended to be implied than an ignorance of the causes. In the true sense of the word "chance" did not exist for Huxley and Darwin. So far as all scientific and common experience goes, every event is connected with foregoing events in an orderly and inevitable chain of sequences,—a chain that could have been predicted or predetermined by any sufficient intelligence. Moreover, Huxley did not believe that Darwin's views, rightly interpreted, "abolished teleology and eviscerated the argument from design." They only abolished that crude expression of teleology which supposed all structures among animals and plants to have been created in their present forms for their present purposes. Under the stimulus given to biology by the doctrine of evolution that science has progressed far beyond conceptions so rudely mechanical. We know that behind each existing structure there is a long history of change; of change not only in form and appearance, but also in function. In the development of living organisms to-day, as they grow up into tree or animal from seed or egg, we can trace the record of these changes of form; in some cases we can follow the actual change of function. But in a wider sense there is no incongruity between evolution and teleology.

"There is a wider teleology," Huxley wrote, "which is not touched by the doctrine of evolution, but is actually based on the fundamental proposition of evolution. This proposition is that the whole world, living and not living, is the result of the mutual interaction, according to definite laws, of the forces possessed by the molecules of which the primitive nebulosity of the universe was composed. That acute champion of teleology, Paley, saw no difficulty in admitting that the 'production of things' may be the result of mechanical dispositions fixed beforehand by intelligent appointment and kept in action by a power at the centre."



CHAPTER XIV

FREEDOM OF THOUGHT

Authority and Knowledge in Science—The Duty of Doubt—Authority and Individual Judgment in Religion—The Protestant Position—Sir Charles Lyell and the Deluge—Infallibility—The Church and Science—Morality and Dogma—Civil and Religious Liberty—Agnosticism and Clericalism—Meaning of Agnosticism—Knowledge and Evidence—The Method of Agnosticism.

In the practice of modern law-courts, a witness rarely is allowed to offer as evidence any statement for which he himself is not the direct authority. What he himself saw or heard or did with regard to the matter at issue—these, and not what others told him they had seen or heard or done, are the limits within which he is allowed to be a competent witness. As a matter of fact, in the business of life we have to act differently. A large proportion of our opinions, beliefs, and reasons for conduct must come to us on the authority of others. We have no direct experience of the past; of the present we can see little and only the little immediately surrounding us. In a multitude of affairs we have to act on authority, to accept from books or from persons what we have not ourselves the opportunity of knowing. It would seem, then, to be a primary duty to learn to distinguish in our minds those matters which we know directly from those matters which we have accepted on trust; and, secondly, to learn and to apply the best modes of choosing the good and of rejecting the bad authorities. The work of the scientific man is a lifelong exercise of these primary duties. From the first moment he begins to observe living things or to dissect their dead frameworks, to mix chemical substances, to make experiments with magnets and wires, he begins to build, and as long as he continues to work he continues to build for himself a body of first-hand knowledge. But, however he work arduously or through long years, he can visit only the smallest portion of the field of nature in which he is working. It is necessary for him to employ the work of others, submitting, from time to time such accepted work to the tests suggested by his own observations. He learns to regard in a different light all knowledge taken on the authority of others; to distrust it a little until he has learned to weigh its general credibility by his own standards, and its particular credibility by subjecting portions of it to his own tests; to distrust it still more when even small portions fail to answer his tests, and to reject it altogether when the percentage of detected error is large. He learns, in fact, what Huxley called the duty of doubt.

This duty has not been universally accepted. In the history of Christian civilisation (and a parallel series of events might be portrayed from the history of other civilisations), many great institutions and very many great and good men have condemned and feared the habit and attitude of doubt in all its forms. Certain doctrines believed to be of supreme importance to mankind were held to rest on authority independent of, and perhaps not susceptible to, the kind of testing employed in science. Around these doctrines there grew, in time, a body of traditions, customs, new dogmas, and fantasies; and the duty of belief in the first was extended to cover the whole system, the central jewel as well as the accretions and encrustations of time. The domain of religious authority was extended to the whole field of human thought and of human action, and the more unreasonable the dominion became, the more strenuously was the duty of belief urged. The Protestant Reformation was one of the great stages in the conflict for freedom against the universal tyranny that had arisen, but the reformers very naturally retained a considerable portion of the bias against which they had fought. In Protestant countries, in the first half of this century, the duty of belief in the Protestant doctrines, traditions, philosophy, history, and attitude to science reigned supreme, and all weapons, from legitimate argument to abusive invective and social ostracism, were employed against those who acted in accordance with the duty of doubt. Allegations of "unsoundness" or of "free thinking" became barriers to success in life, and those against whom they were made became lowered in the esteem of their fellows.

At the present time, when the advance of science and of civilisation has almost won the battle for freedom of thought, it is difficult to realise the strength of the forces against which Huxley and many others had to fight. Huxley himself said with perfect justice: "I hardly know of a great physical truth whose universal reception has not been preceded by an epoch in which most estimable persons have maintained that the phenomena investigated were directly dependent on the Divine Will, and that the attempt to investigate them was not only futile but blasphemous." As a particular instance of this he cited some episodes in the history of geological science.

"At the present time, it is difficult to persuade serious scientific enquirers to occupy themselves, in any way, with the Noachian Deluge. They look at you with a smile and a shrug, and say they have more important matters to attend to than mere antiquarianism. But it was not so in my youth. At that time geologists and biologists could hardly follow to the end any path of enquiry without finding the way blocked by Noah and his ark, or by the first chapter of Genesis; and it was a serious matter, in this country at any rate, for a man to be suspected of doubting the literal truth of the Diluvial or any other Pentateuchal history. The fiftieth anniversary of the foundation of the Geological Club (in 1824) was, if I remember rightly, the last occasion on which the late Sir Charles Lyell spoke to even so small a public as the members of that body. Our veteran leader lighted up once more; and, referring to the difficulties which beset his early efforts to create a rational science of geology, spoke, with his wonted clearness and vigour, of the social ostracism which pursued him after the publication of the Principles of Geology, in 1830, on account of the obvious tendency of that noble work to discredit the Pentateuchal accounts of the Creation and the Deluge. If my younger contemporaries find this hard to believe, I may refer them to a grave book On the Doctrine of the Deluge, published eight years later, and dedicated by the author to his father, the then Archbishop of York. The first chapter refers to the treatment of the 'Mosaic Deluge,' by Dr. Buckland and Mr. Lyell, in the following terms: 'Their respect for revealed religion has prevented them from arraying themselves openly against the Scriptural account of it—much less do they deny its truth—but they are in a great hurry to escape from the consideration of it, and evidently concur in the opinion of Linnaeus, that no proofs whatever of the Deluge are to be discovered in the structure of the earth.' And after an attempt to reply to some of Lyell's arguments, which it would be cruel to reproduce, the writer continues:—'When, therefore, upon such slender grounds, it is determined, in answer to those who insist on its universality, that the Mosaic Deluge must be considered a preternatural event, far beyond the reach of philosophical enquiry; not only as to the causes employed to produce it, but as to the effects most likely to result from it; that determination wears an aspect of scepticism, which, however much soever it may be unintentional in the mind of the writer, yet cannot but produce an evil impression on those who are already predisposed to carp and cavil at the evidence of Revelation.'"

The great evil of authority was its tendency to erect itself into some form of infallibility of universal application. When, for a time, the geological victory was won, and the supporters of authority had comforted themselves with reconciliations, there arose the much greater and more serious opposition between authority and the conceptions involved in evolution. Huxley, as we have seen in an earlier chapter, found that all the old weapons of authority were resumed with a renewed assurance, and his advocacy of the duty of doubt became not merely the defence of a great principle but a means of self-defence. The conception of infallible authority had been transferred by Protestants from the Church to the Bible, and against this Huxley strove with all his might. It is convenient to reserve a full treatment of Huxley's attitude to the Bible for a separate chapter, but at this point a quotation will shew his general view.



"The truth is that the pretension to infallibility, by whomsoever made, has done endless mischief; with impartial malignity it has proved a curse, alike to those who have made it and those who have accepted it; and its most baneful shape is book infallibility. For sacerdotal corporations and schools of philosophy are able, under due compulsion of opinion, to retreat from positions that have become untenable; while the dead hand of a book sets and stiffens, amidst texts and formulae, until it becomes a mere petrifaction, fit only for that function of stumbling-block, which it so admirably performs. Wherever bibliolatry has prevailed, bigotry and cruelty have accompanied it. It lies at the root of the deep-seated, sometimes disguised, but never absent, antagonism of all varieties of ecclesiasticism to the freedom of thought and to the spirit of scientific investigation."

Moreover, Presbyter is but Priest writ large, and the Protestant clergy were the leaders in denunciation of every person and every branch of investigation or of thought in any way connected with evolution. Huxley was no respecter of persons, and, following the example of Darwin, he was ready to study carefully any arguments for or against any scientific doctrines by whomsoever or howsoever brought forward. The right of criticism and duty of doubt, which he insisted on for himself, he was extremely willing to extend to others, and, as a matter of fact he was on terms of intimate friendship with some of his most distinguished clerical opponents. But to an extent which it is almost impossible now to realise, the clergy generally abused their legitimate position and authority, and demanded or assumed a right to give authoritative opinions on questions which did not come within their domain. It was the old attempt of the Church to make its authority felt in all departments of thought and of action, and the attempt was made in the traditional fashion. Questions of fact were associated with questions of morality, and those who held one view as to the meaning and implication of certain facts were denounced as wicked. Huxley at once carried the war into the enemy's own country:

"And, seeing how large a share of this clamour is raised by the clergy of one denomination or another, may I say, in conclusion, that it really would be well if ecclesiastical persons would reflect that ordination, whatever deep-seated graces it may confer, has never been observed to be followed by any visible increase in the learning or the logic of its subject. Making a man a Bishop, or entrusting him with the office of ministering to even the largest of Presbyterian congregations, or setting him up to lecture to a church congress, really does not in the smallest degree augment such title to respect as his opinions may intrinsically possess. And when such a man presumes on an authority, which was conferred on him for other purposes, to sit in judgment on matters his incompetence to deal with which is patent, it is permissible to ignore his sacerdotal pretensions, and to tell him, as one would tell a mere, common, unconsecrated layman: that it is not necessary for any man to occupy himself with problems of this kind unless he so choose; life is filled full enough with the performance of its ordinary and obvious duties. But that, if a man elect to become a judge of these grave questions; still more if he assume the responsibility of attaching praise or blame to his fellow-men for the conclusions at which they arrive touching them, he will commit a sin more grievous than most breaches of the decalogue, unless he avoid a lazy reliance upon the information that is gathered by prejudice and filtered through passion, unless he go back to the prime sources of knowledge—the facts of Nature, and the thoughts of those wise men who for generations past have been her best interpreters."

In the campaign for absolute freedom of thought, for the duty of not believing anything except on sufficient evidence, Huxley was frequently met by an argument of superficial strength, and which no doubt was in the minds of many of his clerical opponents. In the minds of a majority of people, it was said, and particularly of slightly educated people, the reasons for right conduct and the distinctions between right and wrong are firmly associated with the Bible and with religion. If you allow doubts as to the absolute veracity of the Bible, or as to the supernatural origin of religion to reach such persons, you run a grave risk that they will reflect the uncertainty on the canons of morality. In taking from them what you believe to be false, inevitably you will unsettle their ideas on moral questions although you might be in full agreement as to these moral questions. Huxley refused to accept the asserted association between morality and particular metaphysical or religious doctrines.

"Many ingenious persons now appear to consider that the incompatibility of pantheism, of materialism, and of any doubt about the immortality of the soul, with religion and morality is to be held as an axiomatic truth. I confess that I have a certain difficulty in accepting this dogma. For the Stoics were notoriously materialists and pantheists of the most extreme character; and while no strict Stoic believed in the eternal duration of the individual soul, some even denied its persistence after death. Yet it is equally certain, that, of all gentile philosophies, Stoicism exhibits the highest ethical development, is animated by the most religious spirit, and has exerted the profoundest influence upon the moral and religious development not merely of the best men among the Romans, but among the moderns down to our own day."

He held the view now generally taken by students of the history of man, that standards of conduct and religious beliefs arose in separate ways and developed independently, and that it was only comparatively recently that "religion took morality under its protection." But he met the argument in a still more direct fashion by rejecting entirely the possibility or advisability of founding any system of ethics upon a false basis.

"It is very clear to me," he wrote, "that, as Beelzebub is not to be cast out by Beelzebub, so morality is not to be established by immorality. It is, we are told, the special peculiarity of the devil that he was a liar from the beginning. If we set out in life with pretending to know that which we do not know; with professing to accept for proof evidence which we are well aware is inadequate; with wilfully shutting our eyes and our ears to facts which militate against this or that comfortable hypothesis; we are assuredly doing our best to deserve the same character."

Freedom of thought meant for Huxley all that is best in liberalism applied to life. In an essay on Joseph Priestley, he described the condition of affairs in England last century, when scientific investigation and all forms of independent thinking laboured under the most heavy restrictions that could be imposed by dominant ecclesiastical and civil prejudice. He pointed out the astounding changes between these times and the times of to-day.

"If we ask," he wrote, "what is the deeper meaning of all these vast changes, there can be but one reply. They mean that reason has asserted and exercised her primacy over all the provinces of human activity; that ecclesiastical authority has been relegated to its proper place; that the good of the governed has been finally recognised as the end of government, and the complete responsibility of governors to the people as its means; and that the dependence of natural phenomena in general on the laws of action of what we call matter has become an axiom."

The common ground of those who advocate the duty of belief and those who insist on the duty of doubt is clear. Both are agreed as to the necessity of accepting whatever has sufficient evidence to support it; both agree that there is room for doubt though not necessarily for rejection in cases where the evidence is contaminated or insufficient. It is in the application that the difference lies. The scientific theologian admits the agnostic principle, however widely his results may differ from those reached by the majority of agnostics. "But, as between agnosticism and ecclesiasticism, or, as our neighbours across the Channel call it, clericalism, there can be neither peace nor truce. The cleric asserts that it is morally wrong not to believe certain propositions, whatever the results of a strict scientific investigation of the evidence of these propositions. He tells us that "religious error is, in itself, of an immoral nature" (Newman). It necessarily follows that, for him, the attainment of faith, not the ascertainment of truth, is the highest aim of mental life."

Huxley helped largely in the modern movement which has made it impossible to blame people for doubt, and this was what he strove for most strenuously. Freedom of thought, like freedom of the Press, by no means implies that what is free must necessarily be good. In both cases there may be a rank growth of weeds, nurtured in vicious imagination, and finding a ready market with the credulous mob. For the detection and rejection of these, the critical method of science serves as well as it does against the loftier errors supported by authority.

It was on Descartes and on Hume that Huxley founded the precise form in which he urged the duty of doubt, and his exact words are worth quoting.

"It was in 1619, while meditating in solitary winter quarters, that Descartes (being about the same age as Hume when he wrote the Treatise on Human Nature) made that famous resolution, to "take nothing for truth without clear knowledge that it is such," the great practical effect of which is the sanctification of doubt; the recognition that the profession of belief in propositions, of the truth of which there is no sufficient evidence, is immoral; the discrowning of authority as such; the repudiation of the confusion, beloved of sophists of all sorts, between free assent and merely piously gagged dissent, and the admission of the obligation to reconsider even one's own axioms on due demand."

This was the healthy and active scepticism which took no direct pleasure in doubting, but used doubt only as a means of making knowledge doubly secure, and which prevented false ideas being bolstered up by privilege or by tyranny.

"The development of exact natural knowledge in all its vast range, from physics to history and criticism, is the consequence of the working out, in this province, of the resolution to take nothing for truth without clear knowledge that it is such; to consider all beliefs open to criticism; to regard the value of authority as neither greater nor less than as much as it can prove itself to be worth. The modern spirit is not the spirit 'which always denies,' delighting only in destruction; still less is it that which builds castles in the air rather than not construct; it is the spirit which works and will work 'without haste and without rest,' gathering harvest after harvest of truth into its barns and devouring error with unquenchable fire."

It is a special weakness of the modern human race to love inventing descriptive names by which particular modes of thought may be classified and labelled. In order to meet this demand, Huxley invented the word agnosticism, to serve as a label for his own attitude. The word rapidly became popular, and attempts were made to read into it far more than its inventor implied. For him it was no definite body of doctrine, no creed in any positive sense. It merely expressed the attitude he assumed towards all problems on which he regarded the evidence as insufficient. It was a habit of mind rather than a series of opinions or beliefs; an intellectual weapon and not materials on which to exercise the intellect.

Hume had written that "the justest and most plausible objection against a considerable part of metaphysics was that they are not properly a science, but arise either from the fruitless efforts of human vanity, which would penetrate into subjects utterly inaccessible to the human understanding, or from the craft of popular superstitions, which, being unable to defend themselves on fair ground, raise these entangling brambles to cover and protect them." In these considerations he found reason not for leaving superstition in possession of its ground, but for making a bold and arduous attack upon it in its haunts. The great difficulty in the way of carrying the war into the enemy's own camp was that in those days so-called science was itself cumbered with many illogical and metaphysical ideas, and for the first time in the present century the great advances of physical science, and, in particular, the renewed life poured by Darwin into the doctrine of evolution, made it possible to bring a new series of exact arguments against hazy metaphysical dogmas. The militant side of agnosticism was directed against the camp of superstition and armed with the new weapons of exact science. Its stern refusal of belief without adequate evidence was a challenge to all the supporters of the sanguine philosophy which replaces proof by assured and emphatic statement and restatement. It is possible, although rare, for those who hold a positive belief upon evidence, howsoever insufficient, to leave their doubting neighbours in peace, and these neighbours, assured in their own beliefs, equally positive and perhaps equally unfounded, may return the lazy tolerance. But the agnostic position is at once a reproof and a challenge to all who do not hold it. Perhaps no one has ever put the agnostic attitude more clearly than Kant when he wrote that "the greatest and perhaps sole use of all philosophy of pure reason, is, after all, merely negative, since it serves, not as an organ on (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." It is precisely because it is addressed against error that agnosticism brings not peace but a sword; precisely because, instead of adding to the beliefs of the world, it seeks to examine them and perhaps by the examination to diminish them, that it aroused passionate resentment. In this respect it stands entirely separate and apart from any other similar term, as all these implied a definite acceptance or rejection of some definite propositions. Agnosticism means none of these things. Huxley said of it:

"Agnosticism, in fact, is not a creed but a method, the essence of which lies in a rigorous application of a single principle. That principle is of great antiquity; it is as old as Socrates; as old as the writer who said, 'Try all things, hold fast by that which is good'; it is the foundation of the Reformation, which simply illustrated the axiom that every man should be able to give reason for the faith that is in him; it is the great principle of Descartes; it is the fundamental axiom of modern science. Positively the principle may be expressed: In matters of the intellect, follow your reason as far as it will take you, without regard to any other consideration. And negatively: In matters of the intellect, do not pretend that conclusions are certain which are not demonstrated or demonstrable. That I take to be the agnostic faith, which, if a man keep whole and undefiled, he shall not be ashamed to look the universe in the face, whatever the future may have in store for him."



CHAPTER XV

THE BIBLE AND MIRACLES

Why Huxley Came to Write about the Bible—A Magna Charta of the Poor—The Theological Use of the Bible—The Doctrine of Biblical Infallibility—The Bible and Science—The Three Hypotheses of the Earth's History—Changes in the Past Proved—The Creation Hypothesis—Gladstone on Genesis—Genesis not a Record of Fact—The Hypothesis of Evolution—The New Testament—Theory of Inspiration—Reliance on the Miraculous—The Continuity of Nature no a priori Argument against Miracles—Possibilities and Impossibilities—Miracles a Question of Evidence—Praise of the Bible.

Huxley was by training and habit of mind a naturalist, busy with dissections and drawings, pursuing his branch of science for itself and with no concern as to its possible relation to philosophical speculation or religious dogma. It is possible that, had his life been passed under different conditions, his intellectual activities might have been spent entirely on his scientific work. As it was, he became almost more widely known as a hostile critic of accepted religious doctrine than as a man of science. Many causes contributed to this effect, but the chief reason was the contemporary attitude of the churches to Darwinism. He tells us as a matter of fact that in 1850, nine years before the appearance of The Origin of Species, he had "long done with the Pentateuchal cosmogony which had been impressed on his childish understanding as divine truth." In the chapter he contributed to the Life of Darwin he wrote that in his opinion "the doctrine of evolution does not even come into contact with theism, considered as a philosophical doctrine." The reason of his general attitude to the Bible was simply that his application to it of the agnostic method led him to the view that there was not sufficient evidence for the pretensions assigned to it; the reason of his coming forward as a public and active champion of his views in this matter was partly to make a counter attack on the enemies of science, and partly his innate respect for the propagation of truth. He had the inevitable respect of an Englishman for the English Bible as one of the greatest books in our language, and we have seen how he had advocated its adoption in schools. He had the veneration for its ethical contents common to the best thinkers of all ages since it came into existence, and few writers have ever employed loftier or more direct language to express their respect and admiration. As a venerator of freedom and of liberty he regarded the Bible as the greatest text-book of freedom.

"Throughout the history of the Western world," he wrote, "the Scriptures, Jewish and Christian, have been the great instigators of revolt against the worse forms of clerical and political despotism. The Bible has been the Magna Charta of the poor and of the oppressed; down to modern times no State has had a constitution in which the interests of the people are so largely taken into account, in which the duties, so much more than the privileges, of rulers are insisted upon, as that drawn up for Israel in Deuteronomy and in Leviticus; nowhere is the fundamental truth that the welfare of the State, in the long run, depends on the uprightness of the citizen so strongly laid down. Assuredly the Bible talks no trash about the rights of man; but it insists on the equality of duties, on the liberty to bring about that righteousness which is somewhat different from struggling for 'rights'; on the fraternity of taking thought for one's neighbour as for oneself."

It was not against the Bible but against the applications made of it and implications read into it that he strove.

"In this nineteenth century, as at the dawn of modern physical science, the cosmogony of the semi-barbarous Hebrew is the incubus of the philosopher and the opprobrium of the orthodox. Who shall number the patient and earnest seekers after truth, from the days of Galileo until now, whose lives have been embittered and their good name blasted by the mistaken zeal of Bibliolaters? Who shall count the host of weaker men whose sense of truth has been destroyed in the effort to harmonise impossibilities—whose life has been wasted in the attempt to force the generous new wine of science into the old bottles of Judaism, compelled by the outcry of the same strong party? It is true that if philosophers have suffered, their cause has been amply avenged. Extinguished theologians lie about the cradle of every science as the strangled snakes beside that of Hercules; and history records that whenever science and orthodoxy have been fairly opposed, the latter has been forced to retire from the lists, bleeding and crushed, if not annihilated; scotched, if not slain. But orthodoxy is the Bourbon of the world of thought. It learns not, neither can it forget; and though, at present, bewildered and afraid to move, it is as willing as ever to insist that the first chapter of Genesis contains the beginning and the end of sound science; and to visit, with such petty thunderbolts as its half-paralysed hands can hurl, those who refuse to degrade Nature to the level of primitive Judaism."

These words were written in 1860 and events have moved rapidly since Huxley wrote them. There is now practically no religious body containing a proportion of educated persons which does not allow within it a very wide range of opinion as to the inspiration of the Scriptures, the Biblical account of the Creation, the miraculous events of the Old Testament and the recorded miracles of the New. Within the last few months, Dr. St. George Mivart, a distinguished Catholic zooelogist and long an opponent of Huxley, has declared that within the Catholic Church itself a number of educated persons are prepared to accept most of Huxley's positions, as well as views more extremely iconoclastic than any advanced by Huxley. Although Dr. Mivart's outspoken words have called down on him the official thunders of Rome, it is an open secret that many good Catholics think this attempted exclusion of modern knowledge to be fraught with grave danger to the Church. In these matters the Protestant churches have advanced much farther.

It was very different when Huxley wrote. The first and gravest difficulty placed in the way of science was the asserted infallibility of the Scriptures. In Catholic theology, at least until late in this century, the general tendency has been to regard the Bible rather as a quarry for doctrine than as a direct means of grace. The theory of religion rested on two pillars: the inspired Scriptures containing the necessary information and the inspired Church to interpret the Scriptures. Protestant theology had rejected the infallible inspiration of the Church, and, in consequence, had thrown a greater burden on the Scriptures. The Scriptures became the Word of God, verbally and literally true; in its extreme form this doctrine reverted almost to the ancient Rabbinical maxim that even the vowel points and accents were of divine origin. In practice, if not in theory, the halo was extended to cover even the marginal chronology, then a familiar feature in the editions of the English Bible. The present writer, even so lately as in 1888 was reproved with violence by a clergyman of considerable education and position for expressing a doubt as to the accuracy of these dates. Obviously there was no common measure between a church holding such views and advancing science. War was inevitable, until one side or the other should give way.

Huxley conducted the attack in a series of controversies extending over many years, and in which his opponents were well-known laymen such as Mr. Gladstone, Dr. St. George Mivart, the Duke of Argyll, and many clerical dignitaries of different denominations. The most important of his contributions to these controversies, as well as several isolated essays and addresses, have been collected in two volumes, Science and the Hebrew Tradition, and Science and the Christian Tradition.

The first stage in the controversy, and the stage most immediately pressing, was to shew that the Bible was misleading and inaccurate as a record of scientific fact, and that therefore it could not be brought forward as evidence against scientific doctrines supported by scientific evidence. The vital matter in this was the account given in Genesis of the origin of the world. If that disappeared then the whole ground was gained; science would be left free in its own sphere.

In a lecture on Evolution, delivered in 1876, Huxley began by discussing the possibilities as to the past history of nature. He believed that there were only three hypotheses which had been entertained or which well could be entertained respecting this history. The first was to assume that phenomena of nature similar to those exhibited by the world at present had always existed; in fact that the universe had existed from all eternity in what might be termed, broadly, its present condition. The second hypothesis was that the present condition of things had had only a limited duration, and that, at some period of the past, what we now know came into existence without any relation of natural causation to an antecedent state. The third hypothesis also assumed that the present condition of things had had a limited duration, but it supposed that that condition had been derived by natural processes from an antecedent condition, the hypothesis attempting to set no limits to the series of changes.

In a certain sense, the first hypothesis recalls the doctrine of uniformitarianism, which Hutton and Lyell had shaped from a rational interpretation of the present conditions of nature. But, although it is no longer necessary to imagine the past history of the earth as a series of gigantic catastrophes, yet the whole record of science is against the supposition that anything like the existing state of nature has had an eternal duration. The record of fossils shews that the living population of the earth has been entirely different at different epochs. Geological history shews that, whether these changes have come about by swift catastrophes, or by slow, enduring movements, the surface of the globe, its distribution into land and water, the character of these areas and the conditions of climate to which they have been subjected have passed through changes on a colossal scale. Moreover, if we look from this earth to the universe of stars and suns and planets, we see everywhere evidence of unceasing change. If we use scientific observation and reason, if we employ on the problem the only means we possess for attempting its solution, we cannot accept the hypothesis that the present condition of nature has been eternal.

"So far as that limited revelation of the nature of things, which we call scientific knowledge, has yet gone, it tends, with constantly increasing emphasis, to the belief that, not merely the world of plants, but that of animals; not merely living things but the whole fabric of the earth; not merely our planet but the whole solar system, not merely our star and its satellites, but the millions of similar bodies which bear witness to the order which pervades boundless space and has endured through boundless time, are all working out their predestined courses of evolution."

The second hypothesis is familiar to us in the sacred records of many religious and in the Hebrew Scriptures. Most of these have a fundamental similarity, inasmuch as they offer pictures in which the mode and order of creation are given in the minutest detail and with the simplest kind of anthropomorphism; in which the Creator is represented with familiar human characteristics. But these general considerations, so obvious now that we have learned to read the Bible narrative without passion or prejudice, were not plain to the early opponents of evolution, and it was necessary, step by step, to shew not only that the narrative in Genesis could not be reconciled with known facts if it were accepted in its literal meaning, but that the most strained interpretation of the language failed to bring it into accordance with scientific truth. Mr. Gladstone was the latest and most vigorous of those who attempted to reconcile Genesis with modern knowledge, and in his controversy with Huxley he brought to bear all the resources of an acute intellect trained by long practice in the devices of argument and inspired by a lofty if mistaken enthusiasm. In the course of his argument he wrote:

"But the question is not here of a lofty poem, or a skilfully constructed narrative; it is whether natural science, in the patient exercise of its high calling to examine facts, finds that the works of God cry out against what we have fondly believed to be His word and tell another tale; or whether, in this nineteenth century of Christian progress, it substantially echoes back the majestic sound, which, before it existed as a pursuit, went forth into all lands.

First, looking largely at the latter portion of the narrative, which describes the creation of living organisms, and waiving details, on some of which (as in v. 24) the Septuagint seems to vary from the Hebrew, there is a grand fourfold division, set forth in an orderly succession of times as follows: on the fifth day 1. The water-population. 2. The air-population, and, on the sixth day, 3. The land-population of animals. 4. The land-population consummated in man.

Now this same fourfold order is understood to have been so affirmed in our time by natural science, that it may be taken as a demonstrated conclusion and established fact."

The defence itself shewed that already a large part of the original position had been abandoned. The literal meaning and belief in detailed accuracy were given up and Mr. Gladstone sought to establish only a general correspondence between the Biblical narrative and the results of science. But even in that form Huxley shewed the defence to be untenable.

"I can meet the statement in the last paragraph of the above citation," he replied, "with nothing but a direct negative. If I know anything at all about the results attained by the natural science of our time, it is a 'demonstrated conclusion and established fact' that the fourfold order given by Mr. Gladstone is not that in which the evidence at our disposal tends to shew that the water, air, and land populations of our globe made their appearance."

With the most voluminous detail, he proceeds to shew that there is no possible relation between the order implied by the narrative and the order as revealed by science. Let us sum up, by two quotations, the result of the whole controversy. First, the literal meaning is untenable.

"The question whether the earth and the immediate progenitors of its present living population were made in six natural days or not is no longer one on which two opinions can be held. The fact that it did not come so into being stands upon as sound a basis as any fact of history whatever. It is not true that existing plants and animals came into being within three days of the creation of the earth out of nothing, for it is certain that innumerable generations of other plants and animals lived upon the earth before its present population. And when, Sunday after Sunday, men who profess to be our instructors in righteousness read out the statement, 'In six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is,' in innumerable churches, they are either propagating what they may easily know, and, therefore, are bound to know, to be falsities; or, if they use the words in some non-natural sense, they fall below the moral standard of the much abused Jesuit."

The attenuated meaning equally must be given up.

"Even if they (the reconcilers) now allow that the words 'the evening and the morning' have not the least reference to a natural day, but mean a period of any number of millions of years that may be necessary; even if they are driven to admit that the word 'creation,' which so many millions of pious Jews and Christians have held, and still hold, to mean a sudden act of the Deity, signifies a process of gradual evolution of one species from another, extending through immeasurable time; even if they are willing to grant that the asserted coincidence of the order of nature with the 'fourfold order' ascribed to Genesis is an obvious error instead of an established truth, they are surely prepared to make a last stand upon the conception which underlies the whole, and which constitutes the essence of Mr. Gladstone's 'fourfold division, set forth in an orderly succession of times.' It is that the animal species which compose the water-population, the air-population, and the land-population, respectively, originated during three distinct and successive periods of time, and only during these periods of time.... But even this sublimated essence of the Pentateuchal doctrine remains as discordant with natural science as ever."

There remains the third, or evolutionary hypothesis regarding the origin of the existing order of nature. As Huxley held it, it was rigidly limited within the possibilities afforded by the agnostic attitude. With regard to the real nature, the origin and destiny of the whole universe, there was not sufficient evidence before the human mind, if indeed the human mind were capable of receiving such evidence, to come to any conclusion. For the rest, for the actual condition of the earth itself, science was gradually accumulating overwhelming evidence in favour of a continuous evolution, under natural agencies, from the beginning of life to the existing forms of animals and plants, and the actual origin of life from inorganic matter under similarly natural agencies was becoming more and more a legitimate inference.

Huxley's relation to the New Testament may be summed up in few words. It was simply that there was not sufficient evidence for ascribing to it the supernatural sanction demanded for it by dogmatic theology.

"From the dawn of scientific Biblical criticism until the present day, the evidence against the long-cherished notion that the three synoptic gospels are the work of three independent authors, each prompted by Divine inspiration, has steadily accumulated, until, at the present time, there is no visible escape from the conclusion that each of the three is a compilation consisting of a groundwork common to all three—the three-fold tradition; and of a superstructure consisting, firstly, of matter common to it with one of the others, and, secondly, of matter common to each."

Again:—"There is no proof, nothing more than a fair presumption, that any one of the gospels existed, in the state in which we find it in the authorised version of the Bible, before the second century, or, in other words, sixty or seventy years after the events recorded." These considerations with slight differences in details are now practically admitted among the abler apologists, with the result that, as Huxley claimed, the New Testament, like the Old, must be treated as literature rather than as Dogma. As Literature everyone has the right to examine the contents critically, and, considering the importance attributed to the contents, the right becomes a duty. No doubt, had Huxley not lived there would have been others equally ready and equally able to gain the battle for freedom of thought in its special application to the claim of the Bible to stand in the way of the advance of scientific knowledge; but as it is, it cannot be denied that the existing prevalence of liberal views, inside and outside the churches, on the nature and interpretation of the Scriptures is largely due to him.

After the question of inspiration, the most striking feature of the Bible is its appeal to miracles and the miraculous element. It is now necessary to examine the position assumed by Huxley towards these. Two great a priori difficulties have been brought against accepting any record of miracles as true. The first of these is very simple, depending on the history of all times and peoples. It is that the human race has shewn itself universally credulous in this matter. It has cried "Wolf!" so readily, so honestly, and on so many occasions that the cry has ceased to carry conviction with it. Every religion has its series of miraculous events; every savage tribe and every uneducated race has its miracle-workers implicitly accepted. In mediaeval and modern Europe up to our own times, miracles have been so constantly recorded on testimony of such undoubted integrity that we must either believe that miracles can be performed by numberless persons with no other claim to special regard, or that it is singularly easy to get false but honest evidence regarding them. Huxley supported the latter alternative strongly, and held the view that to believe in any particular miracles would require evidence very much more direct and very much stronger than would be necessary in the case of inherently probable events.

The second a priori objection to the credibility of miracles has been urged more strongly, but was not accepted by Huxley. It is that miracles are inherently incredible inasmuch as they are "violations of the order of nature." Hume, attacking miracles, had made this objection the chief ground of his argument. Huxley paid a logical respect, at least as great, to the continuity of nature.

"When the experience of generation after generation is recorded, and a single book tells us more than Methuselah could have learned, had he spent every waking hour of his thousand years in learning; when apparent disorders are found to be only the recurrent pulses of a slow-working order, and the wonder of a year becomes the commonplace of a century; when repeated and minute examination never reveals a break in the chain of causes and effects; and the whole edifice of practical life is built upon our faith in its continuity; the belief that that chain has never been broken and will never be broken, becomes one of the strongest and most justifiable of human convictions. And it must be admitted to be a reasonable request, if we ask those who would have us put faith in the actual occurrence of interruptions of that order, to produce evidence in favour of their view, not only equal, but superior, in weight, to that which leads us to adopt ours."

But out of the mouth of Hume himself he declared against making the recorded experience of man, however lengthy and impressive, a necessary ground for rejecting the possibility of the miraculous. Hume had said, "Whatever is intelligible and can be distinctly conceived implies no contradiction, and can never be proved false by any demonstration, argument, or reasoning, a priori." This or the like applies to most of the recorded miracles. Huxley was extremely careful not to assert that they were incredible merely because they might involve conditions outside our existing experience. It is a vulgar mistake, for which science certainly gives no warrant, to assert that things are impossible because they contradict our experience. In such a sense many of the most common modern conveniences of life would have seemed impossible a century ago. To travel with safety sixty miles an hour, to talk through the telephone with a friend an hundred miles away, to receive intelligible messages across the Atlantic by a cable, and, still more, to communicate by wireless telegraphy would have seemed impossible until recently. At the present time, the conversion of a baser metal into gold would be called impossible by everyone with a little knowledge of elementary chemistry. This last example leads admirably to a right understanding of the scientific view of impossibility. The older alchemists, partly from ignorance and partly from credulity, believed absolutely in the possibility of transmuting the metals. The advance of chemical science led to definite conceptions of the differences between compounds and elementary bodies, and of the independence of these elements. The methods and reasoning of the alchemists became absurd, and no one would attempt seriously to transmute the metals on their lines. These advances, however, do not give us the right to assume that the elements are absolutely independent, and that transmutation is therefore impossible. Some of the most recent progress in chemistry has opened up the suggestion that the elements themselves are different combinations of a common substance. Huxley applied this particular argument to the miracle at the marriage of Cana.

"You are quite mistaken in supposing that anybody who is acquainted with the possibilities of physical science will undertake categorically to deny that water may be turned into wine. Many very competent judges are inclined to think that the bodies which we have hitherto regarded as elementary are really composite arrangements of the particles of a uniform primitive matter. Supposing that view to be correct, there would be no more theoretical difficulty about turning water into alcohol, ethereal and colouring matters, than there is, at this present moment, any practical difficulty in working other such miracles; as when we turn sugar into alcohol, carbonic acid, glycerine, and succinic acid; or transmute gas-refuse into perfumes rarer than musk and dyes richer than Tyrian purple."

Unless we make the unscientific and preposterous assumption that our present knowledge of nature and of natural forces is absolute and complete, it is unscientific and illogical to declare at once that any supposed events could not have happened merely because they seem to have contradicted so-called natural laws.

"Strictly speaking," Huxley wrote, "I am unaware of anything that has a right to the title of an 'impossibility' except a contradiction in terms. There are impossibilities logical, but none natural. A 'round square,' a 'present past,' 'two parallel lines that intersect,' are impossibilities, because the ideas denoted by the predicates, round, present, intersect, are contradictory of the ideas denoted by the subjects, square, past, parallel. But walking on water, or turning water into wine, or procreation without male intervention, or raising the dead, are plainly not impossibilities in this sense."

The whole matter turns on the question of sufficient evidence.

"Hume's arguments resolve themselves into a simple statement of the dictates of common sense which may be expressed in this canon: the more a statement of fact conflicts with previous experience, the more complete must be the evidence which is to justify us in believing it."

Again, expressing the same idea in different words, he wrote:

"Nobody can presume to say what the order of nature must be; all that the widest experience (even if it extended over all past time and through all space) that events had happened in a certain way could justify, would be a proportionately strong expectation that events will go on so happening, and the demand for a proportional strength of evidence in favour of any assertion that they had happened otherwise. It is this weighty consideration, the truth of which everyone who is capable of logical thought must surely admit, which knocks the bottom out of all a priori objections either to ordinary 'miracles' or to the efficacy of prayer, in so far as the latter implies the miraculous intervention of a higher power. No one is entitled to say, a priori, that prayer for some change in the ordinary course of nature cannot possibly avail."

It was a question of evidence, and not only did the evidence not convince Huxley, but the thaumaturgic nature of the Biblical miracles provided him with additional reason for refusing to attach any extrinsic value to the contents of the book.

On the other hand, although he declined to accept the Bible as a miraculous and authentic revelation, again and again he expressed himself in the strongest terms as to its value to mankind, and as to the impossibility of any scientific advance diminishing in any way whatsoever that value.

"The antagonism between religion and science, about which we hear so much, appears to me to be purely factitious—fabricated, on the one hand, by shortsighted religious people who confound a certain branch of science, theology, with religion; and, on the other, by equally shortsighted scientific people who forget that science takes for its province only that which is susceptible of clear intellectual comprehension; and that, outside the boundaries of that province, they must be content with imagination, with hope, and with ignorance."

And again;

"In the eighth century B.C., in the heart of a world of idolatrous polytheists, the Hebrew prophets put forth a conception of religion which appears to me to be as wonderful an inspiration of genius as the art of Pheidias or the science of Aristotle. 'And what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?' If any so-called religion takes away from this great saying of Micah, I think it wantonly mutilates, while if it adds thereto, I think it obscures, the perfect ideal of religion."



CHAPTER XVI

ETHICS OF THE COSMOS

Conduct and Metaphysics—Conventional and Critical Minds—Good and Evil—Huxley's Last Appearance at Oxford—The Ethical Process and the Cosmic Process—Man's Intervention—The Cosmic Process Evil—Ancient Reconciliations—Modern Acceptance of the Difficulties—Criticism of Huxley's Pessimism—Man and his Ethical Aspirations Part of the Cosmos.

We have seen that Huxley refused to acquiesce in the current orthodox doctrine that our systems of morality rested on a special revelation, miraculous in its origin, and vouched for by the recorded miracles of its Founder, or by those entrusted by the Founder with miraculous power. He supported the view that, historically and actually, there is no necessary connection between religion and morality. The one is an attempt, in his opinion always unsuccessful, to lift the veil from the unseen, to know the unknowable; the other is simply the code that social man, through the ages, has elaborated for his own guidance, and proved by his own experience. So far as the conduct of life goes, the morality of one who accepts the agnostic position with regard to revelation and the unseen universe differs in no respect from the code taken under the protection of the modern forms of religion. As John Morley, in his Essay on Voltaire wrote of such a person:

"There are new solutions for him, if the old have fallen dumb. If he no longer believe death to be a stroke from the sword of God's justice, but the leaden footfall of an inflexible law of matter, the humility of his awe is deepened, and the tenderness of his pity made holier, that creatures who can love so much should have their days so shut round with a wall of darkness. The purifying anguish of remorse will be stronger, not weaker, when he has trained himself to look upon every wrong in thought, every duty omitted from act, each infringement of the inner spiritual law which humanity is constantly perfecting for its own guidance and advantage, less as a breach of the decrees of an unseen tribunal than as an ungrateful infection weakening and corrupting the future of his brothers."