Abstract
The enemy of knowledge, as Huxley saw it, was faith: ‘The man of science has learned to believe in justification, not by faith, but by verification.’1 Huxley’s language shapes itself paradoxically, as the negative form of the language of religion; that is, in its often witty and bitter rejection of religion as a method of knowing, it retains the religious structure and the sanction of feeling that goes with it. The fondest ‘convictions of barbarous and semi-barbarous people’ are the convictions Huxley associates with religion: ‘that authority is the soundest basis of belief; that merit attaches to a readiness to believe; that the doubting disposition is a bad one, and scepticism a sin.’ Huxley assumes ‘the exact reverse … to be true’. The ‘semi-barbarous’ sounds like the John Henry Newman of the Apologia pro vita sua, published two years before. But ‘the improver of natural knowledge’, Huxley affirms, ‘absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, scepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin.’2 The reversal is ‘exact’, the refusal ‘absolute’, and faith, in the deliberate paradox, becomes an ‘unpardonable sin’. Huxley’s language depends upon the mode it is rejecting.
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Notes
T.H. Huxley, ‘On the Advisableness of Improving Natural Knowledge’ (1866) Methods and Results (London, 1893) 41.
ibid., 40.
ibid., 41.
Adrian Desmond, Archetypes and Ancestors: Palaeontology in Victorian England, 1850–1875 (Chicago, 1984); Frank M. Turner, ‘Public Science in Britain, 1880–1919’, Isis, 71 (1980) 589–608; Frank M. Turner, ‘The Victorian Conflict between Science and Religion: A Professional Dimension’, Isis, 69 (1978) 356–76.
James R. Moore, The Post-Darwinian Controversies: A Study of the Protestant Struggle to Come to Terms with Darwin in Great Britain and America, 1870–1900 (Cambridge, 1979).
Frank M. Turner, Between Science and Religion: The Reaction to Scientific Naturalism in Late Victorian England (New Haven, Conn., 1974) 36.
John Tyndall, ‘The Belfast Address’, Fragments of Science, 2 vols (New York, 1899) 2: 199. Since this chapter was written, Peter Allan Dale has published what is certainly the most extensive and important study of nineteenth-century positivism in relation to literature and to the development of modernist and post-modernist theory. Much of what he says confirms in detail and in fine-grained argument the general tenor of my argument in this chapter; much might be taken to supersede my argument. Dale’s is perhaps the first book by a literary critic to allow to positivism the complexity and richness that it surely embodied. His book is not at all a ‘defense’ of positivism, but it keenly describes the vagaries of its development and of its influence on the thinkers and writers of the period. He demonstrates that positivist thought was constantly forced to return to the recognition that ‘imaginary projection’ is inevitably a condition of scientific knowledge. The truly imaginary being, he concludes, is ‘a serious positivist thinker who was unaware of the necessary intervention of the mind’s intentional structure between himself or herself and the world as in itself it really is.’ (Peter Allan Dale, In Pursuit of a Scientific Culture (Madison, Wisonsin, 1989) 280–1.)
Arthur Balfour, A Defence of Philosophic Doubt: Being an Essay on the Foundations of Belief (London, 1879) 293–4.
For two diverse but powerful approaches to the mythological elements in science, see Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots (London, 1983), and Michel Serre, Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy, ed. Josué V. Harari and David F. Bell (Baltimore, 1982) esp. xxix: ‘The domains of myth, science, and literature oscillate frantically back and forth with one another, so the idea of ever distinguishing between them becomes more and more chimerical.’
See my ‘George Eliot’s Hypothesis of Reality’, Nineteenth Century Fiction, 35 (1980) 1–28.
T.H. Huxley, ‘The Progress of Science’ (1887) Methods and Results, 60–1.
On this point, see David Hull, Darwin and His Critics: The Reception of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution by the Scientific Community (Chicago, 1973) 64–74; and Ernst Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought (Cambridge, Mass., 1981) 36–67.
Edward B. Tylor, Primitive Culture, 2 vols (London, 1920) 1: 2.
ibid.
ibid., 33.
ibid., 69.
ibid., 39.
ibid., 69.
Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871; Princeton, NJ, 1981) 1: 153.
George W. Stocking, Jr, Race, Culture, and Evolution (Chicago, 1982) 87–8.
First published in Houston Peterson, Huxley: Prophet of Science (London, 1932) 326.
Richard Jenkyns, The Victorians and Ancient Greece (Cambridge, Mass., 1980) 266.
Richard J. Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism (Philadelphia, 1983) 18.
Matthew Arnold, Philistinism in England and America, ed. R.R. Super (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1974) 66.
ibid.
Robert A. Donovan, ‘Mill, Arnold, and Scientific Humanism’, in Victorian Science and Victorian Values: Literary Perspectives, ed. James Paradis and Thomas Postlewait (New York, 1981) 189.
John Stuart Mill, Autobiography (1873) ed. Jack Stillinger (Boston, Mass., 1969) 92.
Lyon Playfair, ‘Science and Technology as Sources of Natural Power’ (1886), in Victorian Science, ed. George Basalla, William Coleman, and H. Kargon (Garden City, NY, 1970) 69.
T.H. Huxley, ‘Science and Culture’ (1880) Science and Education (London, 1894) 156.
ibid.
See the famous clarification by Darwin in later editions of the Origins of Species, ch. iv, and his almost exact duplication of it in the ‘Introduction’ to The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication (1866) 2 vols (New York, 1900) 1: 7. For Darwin, laws are merely ‘the sequence of events as ascertained by us’.
John Tyndall, ‘Science and Man’ (1877) Fragments of Science, 2: 353.
ibid., 354–5.
ibid., 355.
W.H. Mallock, The New Republic (1877) ed. J. Max Patrick (Gainesville, Fla, 1950) 42.
Ian Hacking (ed.), Scientific Revolutions (Oxford, 1981) 2.
Stephen Toulmin and June Goodfield, The Architecture of Matter (New York, 1962) 240.
John Passmore, A Hundred Years of Philosophy (Harmondsworth, 1967) 324.
T.H. Huxley, Evolution and Ethics (London, 1911) 80.
Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (1859) ed. J.W. Burrow (Harmondsworth, 1968) 348.
Charles Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin (New York, 1958) 90.
T.H. Huxley, ‘Nature: Aphorisms by Goethe’, Nature, 1, no. 1 (4 November 1869) 9–11.
Tess Cosslett, The ‘Scientific Movement’ and Victorian Literature (Sussex, 1982) 2.
W.K. Clifford, Lectures and Essays, 2 vols (London, 1910) 2: 279.
ibid., 1: 390.
ibid., 2: 125.
ibid., 2: 175.
ibid., 1: 79.
ibid., 1: 84–5.
ibid., 2: 20.
ibid., 2: 308–9.
Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (1869) ed. Ian Gregor (Indianapolis, 1971) 79.
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© 1990 Richard J. Helmstadter and Bernard Lightman
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Levine, G. (1990). Scientific Discourse as an Alternative to Faith. In: Helmstadter, R.J., Lightman, B. (eds) Victorian Faith in Crisis. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-10974-6_8
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