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.
The general tone of the Metaphysical Society was one of
extreme consideration for the feelings of opponents, and your
father's speaking formed no exception to the general harmony.
At the same time, I seemed to remember him as the most
combative of all the speakers who took a leading part in
the debates. His habit of never wasting words, and the edge
naturally given to his remarks by his genius for clear and
effective statement, partly account for this impression;
still, I used to think that he liked fighting, and
occasionally liked to give play to his sarcastic
humour--though always strictly within the limits imposed by
courtesy. I remember that on one occasion, when I had read
to the Society an essay on "The Incoherence of Empiricism," I
looked forward with some little anxiety to his criticisms;
and when they came I felt that my anxiety had not been
superfluous; he "went for" the weak points of my argument in
half-a-dozen trenchant sentences, of which I shall not
forget the impression. It was hard hitting, though perfectly
courteous and fair.
The paper to be read at each meeting of the Society was printed
and circulated in advance, so that all might be prepared with their
arguments. Discussion followed the dinner at which the members met.
Of these papers Huxley contributed three, the titles of which
sufficiently indicate the fundamental points on which his criticism
played, questioning current axioms in its search for trustworthy
evidence of their validity. The first (1869) was on "The Views of
Hume, Kant, and Whately on the Logical Basis of the Doctrine of
the Immortality of the Soul," showing that these thinkers agreed in
holding that no such basis is given by reasoning apart, for instance,
from revelation. The argument is summarized in the essay on Hume
(_Coll. Ess._, vi, 201; 1878).
The second was "Has a Frog a Soul? and if so, of what Nature is that
Soul?" (1870), a physiological discussion as to the seat of those
purposive actions of which the animal is capable after it has lost
ordinary volition and consciousness by the removal of the front part
of its brain. Are these things attributes of the soul, and are
they resident not even in the brain, but in the spinal marrow? If
metaphysics starts from psychology, psychology itself depends greatly
upon physiology; current theories need reconsideration. This paper
was the starting-point for his larger essay on "Animals as Automata,"
delivered as an address before the British Association in 1874.
The third paper (1876) was on "The Evidence of the Miracle of the
Resurrection," as to which he, so to say, moved the previous question,
arguing that there was no valid evidence of actual death having taken
place. The paper was the result of an invitation on the part of some
of his metaphysical opponents. As he rejected the miraculous, they
asked him to write on a definite miracle, and explain his reasons for
not accepting it. He chose this subject because, in the first place,
it was a cardinal instance; and, in the second, that as it was a
miracle not worked by Christ himself, a discussion of its genuineness
could not possibly suggest personal fraud and so inflict gratuitous
pain upon believers in it. The question of the fundamentals of
Christian evidences had long been in his mind; it was no new subject
to him when in the eighties, debarred by his health from physiological
researches, he extended his work on Biblical studies.
If the Metaphysical Society effected nothing else, it brought about
a personal _rapprochement_ between the representatives of opposing
schools of thought. It became clear to the older school that the new
thinkers had by no means failed, as they suspected, to examine the
older doctrines. Theirs was not dishonest doubt, but a strong demand
for better evidence. If the Society itself "died of too much love," it
may well have contributed to the greater amenity of public discussion
as the years passed, and the diminution of the former rabid
denunciations which waned as the new doctrines spread, and were even
absorbed and digested by their former antagonists.