Week 09, Darwin, Huxley, Robert Browning

General Notes on Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man (Edition: E-Text)

Evolutionary Theory and the Moral Sense

My purpose in this guide is to set down some of the most basic among Charles Darwin’s concepts and to discuss some implications of these scientific concepts for “cultural criticism.” Darwin’s theory of evolution was important to British theory and culture. Evolutionism caused anxiety in many sensitive, intelligent people whose faith in Christianity had for some time been buckling under the weight of the Industrial Revolution and capitalism, ecclesiastical infighting, and historicist biblical scholarship, among other things. Unfortunately, the doctrine of evolution also provided matter for the least responsible cultural theorists; it affected not only the T. H. Huxleys of England but the Herbert Spencers as well, the “social Darwinists” who stole the master’s ideas and used them to suggest that human poverty, misery, and vice were somehow “natural” and therefore necessary. What was the intellectual material that created such a storm? Darwin’s fundamental principle was that all life, including human life, evolved from some lower ancestral form or forms. Darwin’s own writings can best explain the basic scientific context necessary to an understanding of “Darwinism” for cultural theory.

How, according to Darwin, did higher life forms evolve? What are the basic principles of evolutionism? In the second of his two main treatises, The Descent of Man, Darwin’s answer is that variation, natural selection, and sexual selection are responsible for all life that now exists on our planet. By variation, Darwin refers to nine laws that he believes to be responsible for physical changes in living things:

1. The direct and definite action of changed [environmental] conditions
2. The effects of the long-continued use or disuse of parts
3. The cohesion of homologous parts
4. The variability of multiple parts
5. Compensation of growth
6. The effects of the mechanical pressure of one part on another
7. Arrests of development, leading to the diminution or suppression of parts
8. The reappearance of long-lost characters through reversion
9. Correlated variation

All of the above laws would, time permitting, deserve some attention, but the most important, if most “perplexing” (Darwin’s word) among them is the “direct and definite action of changed [environmental] conditions.” This law implies that a change in external living conditions affects the physical structure of a given set of organisms. The clearest examples Darwin provides of such environmental impact are variations in stature, weight, and hair or fur growth on the basis of geographical, climactic differences. Darwin’s next vehicle of evolution is “natural selection.” This concept implies that the better adapted a given organism (or group of organisms) is to a set of environmental conditions, the more likely it will be to survive and thrive. The creatures that can best cope with their environment—the best hunters, foragers, burrowers, camouflagers, and so on—will tend to propagate more of their kind and crowd out less well-adapted species, subspecies, and individuals.

Darwin’s point is not that of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829)—he does not believe that animals directly change their structure to suit a given environment; rather, Darwin means that certain animals possess characteristics that allow them to survive in their environment. Thus, such animals will tend to survive while animals born with less favorable characteristics will die and fail to propagate their kind. Variation and natural selection go together as agents of evolution. When certain variations occur (for whatever reasons) in an organism’s structure and behavior, the change either will or will not serve that organism well in its surroundings. (The surroundings, one might add, are also subject to change.) Here Darwin presents us with a dynamic model for evolutionary change, one in which very little can be taken for granted with respect to “survival value.” A creature may be finely adapted to its environment, and then suddenly find itself literally out in the cold or hunted when that environment and its other inhabitants change. Unlike Lamarckian theory, in which “improvements in the structure of animals took the form of the inheritance by offspring of some modified characteristic acquired by a parent as a result of some environmental circumstance faced by that parent” and in which evolution is propelled by “a natural drive towards perfection,” natural selection operates without teleological purpose. “Survival of the fittest” may be the phrase used to characterize natural selection, but this phrase does not imply that nature has any pre-established purpose in selecting individuals and species as it does. (“Herbert Spencer’s Liberalism” in Victorian Liberalism: Nineteenth-Century Political Thought and Practice, ed. R. Bellamy. London: Routledge, 1990, page 118. See also The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, ed. Ted Honderich. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995, page 453.)

Add “sexual selection” to these two principles of variation and natural selection, and we have a tolerably adequate model for Darwinian evolution. Sexual selection, according to Darwin, produces even more dramatic effects than the more general “natural selection.” Male and female animals, he says, often develop the most extraordinary means of charming one another and defeating rival lovers, and these physical characteristics and behaviors are far less limited in their power to induce beneficial changes in an animal’s structure and habits than are the more general demands of natural selection. For example, so long as a male’s courage and claws do not violate the dictates of natural selection—of getting by in the environment—that male is free to develop a great number of interesting, and perhaps useful, new “tricks” and structural differences.

Variation, natural selection, and sexual selection, then, work together to constitute the process of evolution. Now we must ask what kind of evolution evolution caused, however partially or indirectly, in British culture and cultural analysis. Darwin’s theory was not comforting to an era sometimes characterized as a time of religious doubt. It would be simplistic to claim that Darwin’s ideas caused such a crisis, but they certainly helped to shake some thoughtful Victorians’ belief in such basic concepts as god, a benevolent natural world, morality, and progress. If evolution is the law of the universe, how can human beings regard themselves as the center of that universe, or even as significant? In The Victorian Frame of Mind (New Haven: Yale UP, 1957), Walter Houghton writes perceptively on this problem:

In spite of some notable anticipations, in Hobbes, for example, nature had been thought of as the manifestation of a good and beneficent God. Natural theology, culminating in [William] Paley, had emphasized the order and design of a creative intelligence; the romantic sensibility had found the divine spirit rolling though all things, and had worshiped nature as the nurse and guide of life. But once Lyell’s Principles of Geology had appeared (1830-33), followed by Chambers’ Vestiges of Creation (1844) and Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859), nature became a battleground in which individuals and species fought for their lives and every acre of land was the scene of untold violence and suffering. If this nature was the creation of God, then God, as Tennyson put it, “is disease, murder, and rapine.” Or if not, then either there is no God and no immortality, but only Nature, indifferent to all moral values, impelling all things to a life of instinctive cruelty ending in death; or else God and Nature are locked in an incredible and inexplicable strife. These terrible alternatives are all present, directly or by implication, in the famous passage on evolution in In Memoriam:

Are God and Nature then at strife,
That Nature lends such evil dreams?
So careful of the type she seems,
So careless of the single life,
That I, considering everywhere
Her secret meaning in her deeds,
And finding that of fifty seeds
She often brings but one to bear,

I falter where I firmly trod,
And falling with my weight of cares
Upon the great world’s altar-stairs
That slope thro’ darkness up to God,

I stretch lame hands of faith, and grope,
And gather dust and chaff, and call
To what I feel is Lord of all,
And faintly trust the larger hope.

(Houghton 68-69)

Although Tennyson finished In Memoriam in 1850—nearly a decade before Darwin published The Origin of Species—and thus expresses his concerns about pre-Darwinian developments in the natural sciences, his description of nature as “red in tooth and claw” reads forward to later Victorians’ anxiety about the implications of Darwinian evolution. Even Tennyson’s pre-Darwin nature is not the comforting handwriting of God. What can nature be, then, but some vast, heartless thing, clawing and screeching its way toward a doubtful end? After quoting Tennyson, Houghton references the fears of Thomas Carlyle (one of the best analysts of the Industrial Revolution), about the possibility that evolution might be true. What if it was true? What of ethics? What if, in Houghton’s paraphrase, “conscience and intellect were ‘but developments of the functions of animals’” and if “[f]ar from being the special gift of God, they . . . [were merely] natural mechanisms which all the higher animals had acquired, perhaps by ‘natural selection,’ and developed because of their enormous utility in the long struggle for existence”? (70) In short, Carlyle was afraid that Darwinian evolution would make it nearly impossible to counter the effects of an economic system that threatened to turn human beings into machines, into “stomachs” rather than “souls.” If humans are sophisticated animals that have evolved by natural processes, from what standpoint could one oppose the worst effects of the Industrial Age and capitalism? If men are animals, why should they not be tool-using, laboring machines just as we often say a shark or tiger is a “killing machine”? And why, indeed, shouldn’t the strongest—or richest—tiger thrive? If evolution is the regulatory law of the world, a sophisticated bundle of nerves and muscle like man can hardly invoke “ethics” as a weapon against what has proven to be successful in evolutionary terms. Perhaps, as Thomas Henry Huxley argued, “man is simply a human automaton” (Houghton 70). Perhaps, too, everything comes down to what Herbert Spencer grandly calls “the persistence of force.” Darwin’s theory, understood in a somewhat exaggerated fashion, did its part in unsettling cherished cultural values in nineteenth-century England.

But does Darwin himself take such a gloomy view? Does he believe that human evolution is as bleak as the above scenario suggests? To answer this question requires an examination of Darwin’s scientific views on the vexed question of morality. Because so many of the worst effects of Darwinism had to do with its presumptuously general application in the new social sciences, it would be appropriate to deal first with Darwin’s sense of scientific procedure and fairness. Although certain passages in The Descent of Man may seem anything but impartial, it’s best to be fair to the text and take the good with the bad. When Darwin describes his landing with the Beagle on the shores of Tierra del Fuego, he is, true enough, anything but fair-sounding: “For my own part I would as soon be descended from that heroic little monkey, who braved his dreaded enemy in order to save the life of his keeper . . . as from a savage who delights to torture his enemies, offers up bloody sacrifices, practices infanticide without remorse, treats his wives like slaves, knows no decency, and is haunted by the grossest superstitions” (634). The captain of the Beagle was more generous to the inhabitants of the land he came to catalogue for the British empire. Nonetheless, when he is not exaggerating the flaws of “the lowest savages” but is instead dealing with the basic procedures of empirical science, Darwin is far more careful than men such as Herbert Spencer. For example, in the debate between monogenists (those who believed that humans evolved from one common stock) and polygenists (those who claimed that the different races evolved separately and were, in fact, separate species altogether), Darwin is careful to establish his own monogenist, evolutionist stance through a close, inductive examination of his opponents’ position. In the course of working through the polygenist arguments, he makes this reasonable statement: “Every naturalist who has had the misfortune to undertake the description of a group of highly varying organisms, has encountered cases . . . precisely like that of man; and if of a cautious disposition, he will end by uniting all the forms which graduate into each other, under a single species; for he will say to himself that he has no right to give names to objects which he cannot define” (178). It is unfortunate that some other scientists were not so aware of their limitations when they set out to define, quantify, or otherwise rank complex human qualities and situations, usually in the name of the status quo. By the time Darwin concludes that “before long, the dispute between the monogenists and the polygenists will die a silent and unobserved death” (184), he has dealt well enough with his opposition to give his own statements the ring of authority. And in this debate over the single or multiple origins of humankind, Darwin’s forceful words are all for the good, since anyone can see which way the polygenist school tends with respect to human relations; “separate but equal,” itself a racist doctrine, was not even in the Victorian vocabulary.

But what does Darwin’s theory say about the role of natural and sexual selection in the development of human morals? Reconstructing this theory allows one to make firm statements about the social outlook that evolutionism led its chief proponent to adopt. Darwin’s basic proposition about evolution is that “any animal whatever, endowed with well-marked social instincts, the parental and filial instincts being here included, would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience, as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well, or nearly as well developed, as in man” (Descent 99). Darwin posits, then, that very early in the evolution of any higher animal, natural selection would have led to the development of a social instinct. This instinct would have compelled the animal to feel affection and sympathy at least for members of its own immediate family or other unit. As Darwin says, “the social instincts lead an animal to take pleasure in the society of its fellows, to feel a certain amount of sympathy with them, and to perform various services for them” (99). Later, once the sociable animal’s mental faculties become highly enough developed, memory comes into play and reinforces its sympathetic bond to the group:

images of all past actions and motives would be incessantly passing through the brain of each individual: and that feeling of dissatisfaction, or even misery, which invariably results . . . from any unsatisfied instinct, would arise, as often as it was perceived that the enduring and always present social instinct had yielded to some other instinct, at the time stronger, but neither enduring in its nature, nor leaving behind it a very vivid impression. (100)

It seems that once equipped with memory, this sociable creature is no longer able to obey its mere survival instincts in opposition to the wishes of the group, at least without unpleasant emotional consequences. When the human animal satisfies its individual needs in a way that harms the community, its suffers because the more enduring social instinct has been denied. To sympathy and memory, says Darwin, must be added linguistic comprehension of communal opinions and, lastly, habit. All of these acquisitions greatly enhance the power of the community over the single being’s wishes. Thanks to the complexity of the human animal, Darwin points out, the development of a fully moral sense is rather more complex than his “social animal” narrative implies. People are not the same as bees. Still, he goes on to insist strongly enough to disturb believers in divinely sanctioned ethics that the intellectual and emotional differences between one species and another are of degree rather than of kind. Men and the higher animals, proclaims Darwin, are “likewise in part impelled by mutual love and sympathy, assisted by some amount of reason” (111). There is one thing about humans, though, that separates them from their less sophisticated counterparts: conscience, a quality beyond mere discomfort at having done something reproachable. Darwin then poses the relevant question about conscience:

Although some instincts are more powerful than others, and thus lead to corresponding actions, yet it is untenable, that in man the social instincts (including the love of praise and fear of blame) possess greater strength, or have, through long habit, acquired greater strength than the instincts of self-preservation, hunger, lust, vengeance, etc. Why then does man regret, even though trying to banish such regret, that he has followed the one natural impulse rather than the other; and why does he further feel that he ought to regret his conduct? (113)

Humans, that is, not only become upset when they do wrong in the eyes of the community; individuals continue to feel remorse long after the deed and even say to themselves that they ought to feel bad about anti-social behavior. This imperious ought is a far cry from immediate sensation: it is a binding intellectual construct. Why should this ethical conviction take hold of man? Darwin explains that of all the animals, humans most demonstrably cannot escape the power of memory and reflection. Because of the desire for fellowship and approbation that has been instilled in them by the arduous process of natural selection, they cannot think of violating communal standards without feeling pain, and because of their powerful intellect and memory, they cannot help but think of their acts when they have once done them. These two factors, along with habit, mutually reinforce the social instincts and result in a moral sense so strong as to bring into existence conscience, the internal agent that reproves all infractions of the moral sense. (118)

Darwin believes so strongly in this account of the development of the moral sense and conscience that he is able to remove the “reproach . . . of laying the foundation of the noblest part of our nature in the base principle of selfishness; unless, indeed, the satisfaction which every animal feels, when it follows its proper instincts . . . be called selfish” (123). This is an important point in Darwin’s moral theory because he has just stated that even though the selfish instincts are very compelling, there is no need to make the utilitarian claim that civilization was and remains founded upon humankind’s mere self-interest. It is not, Darwin explains, the “greatest happiness principle” that has been the prime mover in human societies but rather the social instincts and sympathetic feelings that have been generated through ages of evolutionary success. The Benthamite precept about happiness may, he says, be the current standard for human conduct, but it is not and never really was the motive for it; that motive is far more closely connected to the greatest good and general wishes of the community than to the individual’s desire for happiness. (122-23) In fact, says Darwin, regard for the welfare of the group eventually becomes so great that it begins to prohibit even in thought the transgression of that group’s laws and opinions: “The highest possible stage in moral culture is when we recognize that we ought to control our thoughts, and ‘not even in inmost thought to think again the sins that made the past so pleasant to us’” (125). The quotation is from Tennyson’s Idylls of the King—an appropriate choice because of the poem’s chivalric emphasis on self-restraint and patience.

Darwin is at last able to make his peroration on the moral sense. In sum, he offers the social instincts, moral sense, and conscience as our best hope of keeping civilization on the advance. Even before the development of the deepest level of conscience, according to Darwin, changes for the better in men’s relations begin taking place:

As man advances in civilisation, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all the members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him. This point being once reached, there is only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the men of all nations and races. (124)

Moreover, says Darwin, thanks to long our long experience of true conscience, there is all the more reason to feel confident about humanity’s chances of getting along in relative peace: “Looking to future generations, there is no cause to fear that the social instincts will grow weaker, and we may expect that virtuous habits will grow stronger, becoming perhaps fixed by inheritance. In this case the struggle between our higher and lower impulses will be less severe, and virtue will be triumphant.” (127) It makes sense to wonder what Darwin might have thought about such optimistic sentiments had he lived to see the twentieth century, with its global wars, genocidal barbarism, continued poverty, environmental degradation, and so forth. Even so, his central statement is that the moral sense and conscience are not excrescences on the framework of life; they are instead so deeply rooted in mankind by evolutionary natural selection that the human species is unlikely ever to dismiss them as insignificant.

Notes on T. H. Huxley’s “The Physical Basis of Life” (Edition: E-Text)

131. “[S]o widely spread is the conception of life as a something which works through matter, but is independent of it. . . .” Huxley’s argument to the contrary is that life is not independent of natural process and matter.

131. “What, truly, can seem to be more obviously different from one another . . . than the various kinds of living beings?” Much science in Huxley’s day was still done with the naked eye, but we see him here taking up a stance against the ubiquitous assumption that “common sense” must always be right. The inductive method often doesn’t give us results consonant with “common sense,” and in fact provides something much more substantial.

133. “[A] threefold unity–namely, a unity of power or faculty, a unity of form, and a unity of substantial composition–does pervade the whole living world.” This kind of statement is probably why Huxley has sometimes been called “Darwin’s Bulldog”: Darwin himself often asserted the essential unity and continuity of life: creatures and their faculties may differ in degree, but not in kind.

133. “[A]ll the multifarious and complicated activities of man are comprehensible under three categories. Either they are immediately directed towards the maintenance and development of the body, or they effect transitory changes in the relative positions of parts of the body, or they tend towards the continuance of the species.” So the goal of all activities comes down to maintenance, motility, and species-perpetuation, and a great deal of animal movement can be summed up by the terms “irritability and contractility.”

136-37. “[T]he wonderful noonday silence of a tropical forest is, after all, due only to the dullness of our hearing; and could our ears [137] catch the murmur of these tiny Maelstroms, as they whirl in the innumerable myriads of living cells which constitute each tree, we should be stunned, as with the roar of a great city.” This passage is characteristic of Huxley’s rhetorical method, which aims to lend perspective on sometimes vast or dauntingly small phenomena, and make them accessible to contemplation.

137. “But the difference between the powers of the lowest plant, or animal, and those of the highest, is one of degree, not of kind, and depends, as Milne-Edwards long ago so well pointed out, upon the extent to which the principle of the division of labour is carried out in the living economy.” Complex organisms make use of the principle enunciated in the realm of economics by Adam Smith, author of The Wealth of Nations (1776): the more specialized functions become, the more efficient the organism and the more noteworthy things it can accomplish. Simpler organisms function in a more generalized way, and are therefore more limited in what they can do.

142-43. “Protoplasm, simple or nucleated, is the formal basis of all life. It is the clay of the potter. . . .” So protoplasm is the stuff of all life. What is this protoplasm? Well, it contains, says Huxley, “the four elements, carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, in very complex union” (143), in which complex form we call protein. For those interested in the finer points of how the usage of this term differs from current scientific discussion of life’s ability to replicate itself, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protoplasm is worth visiting.

145. “And now, what is the ultimate fate, and what the origin, of the matter of life?” Just as there are religious responses to the question, Huxley implies, so too does science offer a response of its own. He sums it up well in a phrase from Horace’s “Ars Poetica”: “Debemur morti nos nostraque” (line 63): We and all our works are dedicated to death. (Horace’s thought was connected to the birth, flourishing, and death of words, by the way.) The condition of life for the species, as evolution teaches, is the death of all individuals in due season.

146. “[T]he matter of life is a veritable peau de chagrin, and for every vital act it is somewhat the smaller. All work implies waste, and the work of life results, directly or indirectly, in the waste of protoplasm.” Everything we do involves the wastage of a certain amount of life’s substance—there’s what economists would call an “opportunity cost” to doing anything whatsoever. Except, of course, as Huxley points out, that living creatures are capable of repairing the loss that comes from living, at least for the time allotted to each of us. There is an ecosystem of living things that involves an interdependence between life and death, as he goes on to explain over the next several pages, with plants being the “accumulators of the power which animals distribute and disperse” (150).

153. “What better philosophical status has "vitality" than "aquosity"? And why should "vitality" hope for a better fate than the other "itys" which have disappeared since Martinus Scriblerus accounted for the operation of the meat-jack by its inherent "meat-roasting quality," and scorned the "materialism" of those who explained the turning of the spit by a certain mechanism worked by the draught of the chimney.” In other words, there’s no absolute need to posit an external, informing intelligence or power that somehow accounts for life; science can explain the life-process in material terms, and science, at least, should not try to go beyond that explanation. Says Huxley, “I can find no intelligible ground for refusing to say that the properties of protoplasm result from the nature and disposition of its molecules.” Again, those interested in current developments might want to visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protoplasm.

153-54. “But I bid you beware that, in accepting these conclusions, you are placing your feet on the first rung of a ladder which, in most people's estimation, is the reverse of Jacob's, and leads to the antipodes of heaven.” Doesn’t science, then—just as many had feared from the time of Copernicus and Galileo onwards—reduce us to inconsequential specks of dust in a vast universe? Pascal captured the feeling well when he wrote, “the eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me” (Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m'effraie). Huxley has here made a rhetorical shift to the human consequences of the scientific ideas he has been explaining.

155. “I, individually, am no materialist, but, on the contrary, believe materialism to involve grave philosophical error.” Huxley is aware that he may be thought a thoroughgoing materialist “brute,” so he pointedly rejects the charge. But why is the term inappropriate? That is what he will explain in the essay’s final section.

158-59. “I take it to be demonstrable that it is utterly impossible to prove that anything whatever may not be the effect of a material and necessary cause. . . .” Huxley here engages with David Hume’s skeptical philosophy, according to which observing a long succession of similar events still would not prove that causality, and not chance, was behind those events. The point Huxley makes is different—he suggests that we cannot prove anything is not caused, not necessary, and that in fact scientific progress has always involved “the extension of the province of what we call matter and causation, and the concomitant gradual banishment from all regions of human thought of what we call spirit and spontaneity” (159). The more scientific research is done, he suggests, the less plausible it has become to assert that external spiritual or intelligential forces somehow account for the material processes we can observe around us.

159-60. Since such scientific investigation is no doubt going to continue this extension of “matter and law until it is co-extensive with knowledge, with feeling, and with action” (159), says Huxley, many intelligent people “watch what they conceive to be the progress of materialism, in such fear and powerless anger as a savage feels, when, during an eclipse, the great shadow creeps over the face of the sun” (160). But this is where he takes his leave of the materialists and fear-mongers alike. His explanation for the departure is that “matter and spirit are but names for the imaginary substrata of groups of natural phænomena.” In other words, the terms “matter” and “spirit” are only shell-concepts and do not refer to anything substantial; therefore, we need not think of our investment in “matter” as the basis of some terrible iron law of necessity that strips us of all free will.

161-62. “Fact I know; and Law I know; but what is this Necessity, save an empty shadow of my own mind's throwing? // But, if it is certain that we can have no knowledge of the nature of either matter or spirit, and that the notion of necessity is something illegitimately thrust into the perfectly legitimate [162] conception of law, the materialistic position that there is nothing in the world but matter, force, and necessity, is as utterly devoid of justification as the most baseless of theological dogmas.” This is the essence of Huxley’s argument against materialism and against those who would curtail scientific investigation because they fear its moral, philosophical consequences. We cannot posit absolute necessity in dogmatic fashion based on what we manage to learn about natural processes. We don’t and can’t know the nature of matter or spirit, so claiming we have reached a theological-level understanding based on our research into natural phenomena makes no sense. Science may not give us an absolute promise that we aren’t bound to necessity, but neither does it absolutely tell us there is any such absolute as necessity. What Huxley opposes here is dogmatic materialism, which is the obverse of dogmatic theology. We should, he writes, accept David Hume’s understanding of the situation, and realize that there are strict limits to the scope of scientific inquiry: it can’t give us access to the kind of absolute knowledge (paradoxically enough) that would allow us to say things like, “free will is utter nonsense.”

163-64. “We live in a world which is full of misery and ignorance, and the plain duty of each and all of us is to by to make the little corner he can influence somewhat less miserable and somewhat less ignorant than it was before he entered it. To do this effectually it is necessary to be fully possessed of only two beliefs: the first, that the order of Nature is ascertainable by our faculties to an extent which is practically unlimited; the second, that our volition counts for something as a condition of the course of events” (163). With these statements Huxley points us back to something like the Baconian statement of the scientific project: science, Bacon had said, was to be pursued for the sake of ameliorating the human condition and “for the greater glory of God.” Huxley certainly isn’t pushing the latter imperative, but he is promoting the first. His dual insistence is that human volition or will counts for something in the world and that our capacity to learn new things about the natural world is probably infinitely extensible. It so happens that scientists find it most convenient to pursue this extension of our understanding in materialist language because it “connects thought with the other phaenomena of the universe” and promises ever more control over the realm of thought and matter alike.

165. “But the man of science, who, forgetting the limits of philosophical inquiry . . . seems to me to place himself on a level with the mathematician, who should mistake the x's and y's with which he works his problems, for real entities–and with this further disadvantage . . . that the blunders of the latter are of no practical consequence, while the errors of systematic materialism may paralyse the energies and destroy the beauty of a life.” The whole aim of Huxley’s essay has been to suggest emphatically that there’s really nothing to fear from scientific inquiry: it will not and cannot transform our notions about ourselves to the really catastrophic degree posited by the most anxious observers of modern intellectual progress. Evidently, Huxley believes that there’s plenty of “elbow room” for the concept of free humanity no matter how much material knowledge we may accumulate. Leaping up from the bounds of science and positing either some vitalistic “life force” or (alternately, and in league with the theologically-minded) claiming that a god-principle must be behind and above everything that happens only retards progress, in Huxley’s view. Progress comes only when people know how to delimit the boundaries within which they seek to learn. Immanuel Kant had made a rather similar point, after all, when he said we have no access to “things in themselves,” so we had better confine ourselves to what we can know—which for Kant was how the mind itself participates in the construction or disposition of what we term reality. Finally, Huxley’s rhetorical strategy isn’t the only one you might come across in nineteenth-century responses to the advance of scientific knowledge. Nietzsche’s exuberant, classical Greek-oriented embrace of the most destructive admissions about material nature and human life, for instance, differ markedly from the relatively calm approach Huxley takes towards the march of science.