TIM KIRK HUXLEY, T.H. (1825–95)

TIM KIRK HUXLEY, T.H. (1825–95)

The most important of CHARLES DARWIN’S followers in Britain, Huxley was born on

4 May 1825 in Ealing, London, the son of a schoolmaster. Interested in engineering and metaphysics as a youth, he studied medicine, becoming a surgeon in 1845. He joined a surveying ship, HMS Rattlesnake, which charted the waters between Australia and New Guinea, and by its return in 1850 had made various studies of tropical marine life. His account of polyps, in particular, brought him widespread recognition, and he was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1851. Already interested in evolutionary theory, he still limited its application to internal progression within great natural groupings, despite HERBERT SPENCER’S endeavours in 1852 to persuade him to adopt a more general theory. In 1854 he became lecturer at the School of Mines, and in 1855 naturalist to the Geological Survey. In 1858 his account of ‘The Theory of the Vertebrate Skull’ was widely acknowledged to have contributed to the demise of the deductive method in anatomy. After Darwin’s Origin of Species appeared in 1859, Huxley (who reviewed it in The Times ) quickly assented to the general application of evolutionary theory, rejecting in particular Richard Owen’s contention that the anatomical structure of the human brain indicated the uniqueness of the human by comparison with any animal species. Huxley’s case was summarized in Man’s Place in Nature (1863; Collected Essays, vol. 7), in which he linked humans to apes. By this time Huxley had moved into palaeontology and in particular the study of fossil reptiles and fishes. In the 1870s and 1880s Huxley served on a variety of Royal Commissions, became secretary to the Royal Society, and then its president (1881–5); he was also a member of the London School Board, and from 1892 a Privy Councillor. His health was frail after 1885, however, and he died after a long illness at Eastbourne on29 June 1895.

In his role as ‘Darwin’s bulldog’, self-consciously an outsider and even a ‘plebeian’, Huxley was prominently associated with the secularist, ‘agnostic’ (a term he coined in 1869) implications of Darwinism. Although as late as 1856 he had argued that the design of the universe pointed to a governing ‘lnfinite Mind’, Origin of Species effected a conversion to the view that nothing whatsoever could be known about the ultimate nature of the universe. But, while denying that atheism was philosophically tenable, Huxley also contended that there was no firm scientific evidence for any God, and condemned as immoral any doctrine not resting on firm scientific evidence. His views brought him into conflict with many leading public figures, including the Archbishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, who attacked Darwinism in 1860, and the leading Liberal politician, W.E.Gladstone, with whom he engaged in a lengthy controversy in The Nineteenth Century between 1885–91. Huxley’s opposition to the possibility of miracles led him to

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write a study of David Hume, published in 1878 (Collected Essays, vol. 6), but he denied (in ‘Science and Morals’, Collected Essays, vol. 9) being a materialist, regarding the ‘substance of matter’ as an unknown metaphysical quantity, not necessarily a non- existent one. Knowledge of the life and teachings of Jesus, however, he regarded as uncertain, and established Christian doctrine he frequently assailed as an implausible hybrid of paganism and Judaism, while still commending Bible reading as suitable for children. Morality, instead, he viewed as resting on an innate moral sense, and one plausible principle, ‘do as you would be done by’.

This deduction led Huxley to make a substantial contribution to the social application of Darwinian principles of his own, arguing that no precise set of moral precepts could be deduced from natural selection, or indeed existed in the ‘cosmic process’ as a whole. But if nature exhibited no moral purpose as such, the ‘survival of the fittest’, while necessarily governing the lower stages of human evolution, needed to and could be superseded by a co-operative ideal in the higher. Human beings were thus capable of rising above the evolutionary process; this was the chief message of Evolution and Ethics (1893). A strongly ethical man who believed that the substance of religion consisted in acting justly and mercifully, Huxley argued here that ‘ethical nature, while born of a cosmic nature, is necessarily at enmity with its parent’. The ethical progress of society thus consisted in combating the ‘gladiatorial theory of existence’, which could only be reintroduced if overpopulation engendered a new struggle for scarce resources. The state had the duty to educate the poor to help ensure this did not occur. It also could instil that sense of virtue which, for Huxley, would inculcate self-restraint in place of ruthless self- assertion, and promote the survival of the many rather than merely the ‘fittest’, thus ‘curbing the instincts of savagery in civilized men’, but also restraining the destructive aspects of ‘insatiable hunger for enjoyment’. Much of this he saw as achievable through the force of public opinion, rather than law. But if ‘intervention’ was clearly called for in many spheres, Huxley did not take this principle as far towards socialism as A.R.WALLACE, and was as critical of the a priori method of HENRYGEORGE respecting natural rights as of that of Rousseau. He did, however, concede that if ‘the abolition of property would tend still more to promote the good of the people, the State will have the same justification for abolishing property that it now has for maintaining it’. Scathing of evangelical schemes such as ‘General’ William Booth’s ‘Salvation Army’, which he attacked in The Times in 1890–1, Huxley was equally dismissive of the ‘administrative nihilism’ of Herbert Spencer, arguing that the complexity of a high stage of civilization by definition required more widespread interference. The answer was neither anarchy nor regimentation, but some compromise between them based, minimally, upon an ‘irreducible minimum of wages’ necessary for survival.