Thomas H. Huxley

From Philosopedia

Huxley, Thomas Henry (4 May 1825 - 29 June 1895)

An English biologist and the principal exponent in England of Darwin’s theory of evolution—he was called Darwin’s bulldog - Huxley was not, like Darwin, from a family of the monied middle classes. The youngest son of an impecunious schoolmaster, he was born over a butcher’s shop in Ealing but became one of the people who had a profound impact on 19th-century thought. Upon becoming a member of the Metaphysical Society, he explained in Science and the Christian Tradition (1895),

• 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 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.

“Agnosticism,” he explained, “is not a creed but a method, the essence of which lies in the vigorous application of a single principle.…Positively the principle may be expressed as in matters of intellect, follow your reason as far as it can take you without other considerations. And negatively, in matters of the intellect, do not pretend conclusions are certain that are not demonstrated or demonstrable.”

The meaning today, however, is that agnosticism holds that neither the existence nor the nature of God, nor the ultimate origin of the universe, is known or knowable. As Gordon Stein has pointed out, Huxley would be horrified at the violence done to his word by popular usage. Writing about Huxley, Mark Francis has stated,

• The extent of the region of the uncertain varied according to the knowledge and the intellectual habits of the individual agnostic.

However, Huxley wrote,

• I do not very much care to speak of anything as ‘Unknowable.’ I confess that long ago, I once or twice made this mistake; even to the waste of a capital ‘U.’

His opponents enjoyed it when Bishop “Soapy Sam” Wilberforce asked him, “Are you descended from an ape, Mr. Huxley, from your mother’s or your father’s side?” Huxley’s reply put Wilberforce’s “science” into perspective. If such a question were to be put to me, Huxley replied, “would I rather have a miserable ape for a grandfather or a man highly endowed by nature and possessed of great influence and yet who employs these faculties and that influence for the mere purpose of introducing ridicule into a grave scientific discussion, I unhesitatingly affirm my preference for the ape.”

Huxley, who often has been called “Darwin’s bulldog” and the most versatile man of science in nineteenth-century England, later observed,

• Men are very queer animals - a mixture of horse-nervousness, ass-stubbornness, and camel-malice.

Originally a naval surgeon, Huxley took cruises which afforded opportunities for his study of natural history. In 1860 he lectured on “The Relation of Man to the Lower Animals” and in 1863 published Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature. He also published Physical Basis of Life (1868), Lay Sermons (1870), American Addresses (1879), and Evolution and Ethics (1893).

Huxley had some noted controversies with the Liberal Party’s dominant personality, William Gladstone, and the Rev. Mr. Wace, during which he tried to demolish theological fictions while demonstrating scientific facts. His aims in life, Huxley said, were

• the popularising of science and untiring opposition to that ecclesiastical spirit, that clericalism, which in England, as everywhere else, and to whatever denomination it may belong, is the deadly enemy of science.

Two of his sons - Leonard and Julian - were agnostics like their father. Leonard has written that, “Ten years before [T. H.] coined the word . . . he described the Agnostic position he had already reached” in a letter to Kingsley.

According to Joseph McCabe, “but what [their] brilliant brother Aldous believes he alone knows - and I doubt if he does,” a reference to Aldous’s mysticism.

A few months before Thomas Henry Huxley died he said to his son Leonard, “The most remarkable achievement of the Jew was to impose on Europe for eighteen centuries his own superstitions.” Upon his death, scientists throughout the world sent their condolences to the family of one of the most decorated men of science of that time. In 1997, Adrian Desmond published Huxley: Evolution’s High Priest, the first volume of Huxley’s biography.

{BDF; CE; CL; EU, Mark Francis; FUK; JM; OEL; PUT; RAT; RE; TRI; TYD}