Method

Abstract

We have already seen signs that Huxley’s interest in science extended to an awareness of contemporary discussions in the philosophy of science. He in fact observed a crucial stage in the scientists’ conceptualization of science and in his work assessed its significance for the rest of culture. The consequences of science’s cultural dominance, the reductionism and materialism it spawned, disturbed Huxley as much as his Modernist peers. What also concerned him was not science’s power but its limits, radical internal limits that scientists and philosophers were beginning to expose. Huxley stood at the juncture of old and new understandings; his position was part positivist, part constructivist. As early as the 1920s, when positivism held sway, he was exploring subjective and constructivist factors in knowledge-formation, a project that has proven attractive to later commentators (especially those situated outside science). Huxley was certainly influenced by positivism,¹ but from his earliest writing he was forced to recognize that science is a picture rather than a mirror, a picture drawn with language, logic and mathematics. Scientific method continued to ‘work’, in fact its success was spectacular, but there remained a final epistemological gap which we see Huxley poring over with a mixture of relief and dread. At times he resembled an extreme constructivist of the latter part of this century, but in most instances harboured a faith in an underlying reality which is to some extent knowable through scientific method? In philosophical terms, Huxley was a badly shaken Realist but a Realist still, not unlike Einstein, who took a good look at Mach but resisted ultimate constructivism.