Idealism Transcended: Aubrey Moore

Abstract

On 30 June 1860 the Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, and Thomas Huxley, the flamboyant evangelist for the rising scientific disciplines, met in debate at the meeting of the British Association at Oxford. Huxley’s supposed victory over Wilberforce has become one of the myths of Victorian intellectual history, illustrating the triumph of clear-sighted science over the obscurantist forces of reaction represented by the unctuous episcopal authority of the Bishop of Oxford. But is this true?

We have nothing to fear from the free air and the ultimate disclosures of science. What we have to fear is that the level of instruction among the clergy should fall, as it has in France, below that of the average of other professions and of literature. A clergy undisciplined in the method and principles of science, and trained only in theological casuistry, are a dangerous force armed against the interests of the community. Modern societies are regulated more and more by knowledge, and less by tradition.

Pattison, M. (1885b), 191 (Sermon preached on 6.6.1869)