Man's Place in Nature and Other Essays Part 1

Man's Place in Nature and Other Essays.

by Thomas Henry Huxley.

INTRODUCTION

Forty years ago the position of scientific studies was not so firmly established as it is to-day, and a conflict was necessary to secure their general recognition. The forces of obscurantism and of free and easy dogmatism were arrayed against them; and, just as in former centuries astronomy, and in more recent times geology, so in our own lifetime biology, has had to offer a harsh and fighting front, lest its progress be impeded by the hostility born of preconceived opinions, and by the bigotry of self-appointed guardians of conservative views.

The man who probably did as much as any to fight the battle of science in the nineteenth century, and secure the victory for free enquiry and progressive knowledge, is Thomas Henry Huxley; and it is an interesting fact that already the lapse of time is making it possible to bring his writings in cheap form to the notice of a mult.i.tude of interested readers. The pugnacious att.i.tude, however, which, forty years ago, was appropriate, has become a little antique now; the conflict is not indeed over, but it has either totally s.h.i.+fted its ground, or is continued on the old battlefield chiefly by survivors, and by a few of a younger generation who have been brought up in the old spirit.

The truths of materialism now run but little risk of being denied or ignored, they run perhaps some danger of being exaggerated. Brilliantly true and successful in their own territory, they are occasionally pushed by enthusiastic disciples over the frontier line into regions where they can do nothing but break down. As if enthusiastic wors.h.i.+ppers of motor-cars, proud of their performance on the good roads of France, should take them over into the Sahara or essay them on a Polar expedition.

That represents the mistake which, in modern times, by careless thinkers, is being made. They tend to press the materialistic statements and scientific doctrines of a great man like Huxley, as if they were co-extensive with all existence. This is not really a widening of the materialistic aspect of things, it is a cramping of everything else; it is an attempt to limit the universe to one of its aspects.

But the mistake is not made solely, nor even chiefly, by those eager disciples who are pursuing the delusive gleam of a materialistic philosophy--for these there is hope,--to attempt is a healthy exercise, and they will find out their mistake in time; but the mistake is also made by those who are specially impressed with the spiritual side of things, who so delight to see guidance and management everywhere, that they wish to blind their eyes to the very mechanism whereby it is accomplished. They think that those who point out and earnestly study the mechanism are undermining the foundations of faith. Nothing of the kind. A traveller in the deck-cabin of an Atlantic liner may prefer to ignore the engines and the firemen, and all the machinery and toil which is urging him luxuriously forward over the waves in the suns.h.i.+ne; he may try to imagine that he is on a sailing vessel propelled by the free air of heaven alone; but there is just as much utilization of natural forces to a desired end in one case of navigation as in the other, and every detail of the steams.h.i.+p, down to the last drop of sweat from a fireman's grimy body, is an undeniable reality.

There are people who still resent the conclusions of biology as to man's place in nature, and try to counteract them; but, as the late Professor Ritchie said ("Philosophical Studies," page 24)--

"It is a mistake, which has constantly been made in the past by those who are anxious for the spiritual interests of man, to interfere with the changes which are going on in scientific conceptions. Such interference has always ended in the defeat of the supporters of the quasi-scientific doctrines which the growing science of the time has discarded. Theology interfered with Galileo, and gained nothing in the end by its interference.

Astronomy, geology, biology, anthropology, historical criticism, have at different periods raised alarm in the minds of those who dread a materialistic view of man's nature; and with the very best intentions they have tried to fight the supposed enemy on his own ground, eagerly welcoming, for instance, every sign of disagreement between Darwinians and Lamarckians, or every dispute between different schools of historical critics, as if the spiritual well-being of mankind were bound up with the scientific beliefs of the seventeenth, or even earlier, century, as if _e.g._ it made all the difference in man's spiritual nature whether he was made directly out of inorganic dust or slowly ascended from lower organic forms. These are questions that must be settled by specialists. On the other hand, philosophic criticism is in place when the scientific specialist begins to dogmatize about the universe as a whole, when he speaks for example as if an accurate narrative of the various steps by which the lower forms of life have pa.s.sed into the higher was a sufficient explanation to us of the mystery of existence."

Let it be understood, therefore, that science is one thing, and philosophy another: that science most properly concerns itself with matter and motion, and reduces phenomena, as far as it can, to mechanism. The more successfully it does that, the more it fulfils its end and aim; but when, on the strength of that achievement, it seeks to blossom into a philosophy, when it endeavours to conclude that its scope is complete and all-inclusive, that nothing exists in the universe but mechanism, and that the aspect of things from a scientific point of view is their only aspect,--then it is becoming narrow and bigoted and deserving of rebuke. Such rebuke it received from Huxley, such rebuke it will always receive from scientific men who realize properly the magnitude of existence and the vast potentialities of the universe.

Our opportunities of exploration are good as far as they go, but they are not extensive; we live as it were in the mortar of one of the stones of St. Paul's Cathedral; and yet so a.s.siduously have we cultivated our faculties that we can trace something of the outline of the whole design and have begun to realize the plan of the building--a surprising feat for insects of limited faculty. And--continuing the parable--two schools of thought have arisen: one saying that it was conceived in the mind of an architect and designed and built wholly by him, the other saying that it was put together stone by stone in accordance with the laws of mechanics and physics. Both statements are true, and those that emphasize the latter are not thereby denying the existence of Christopher Wren, though to the unwise enthusiasts on the side of design they may appear to be doing so. Each side is stating a truth, and neither side is stating the whole truth. Nor should we find it easy with all our efforts to state the whole truth exhaustively, even about such a thing as that. Those who deny any side of truth are to that extent unbelievers, and Huxley was righteously indignant with those shortsighted bigots who blasphemed against that aspect of divine truth which had been specially revealed to him. This is what he lived to preach, and to this he was faithful to the uttermost.

Let him be thought of as a devotee of truth, and a student of the more materialistic side of things, but never let him be thought of as a philosophical materialist or as one who abounded in cheap negations.

The objection which it is necessary to express concerning Materialism as a complete system is based not on its a.s.sertions but on its negations.

In so far as it makes positive a.s.sertions, embodying the result of scientific discovery and even of scientific speculation based thereupon, there is no fault to find with it; but when, on the strength of that, it sets up to be a philosophy of the universe--all inclusive, therefore, and shutting out a number of truths otherwise perceived, or which appeal to other faculties, or which are equally true and are not really contradictory of legitimately materialistic statements--then it is that its insufficiency and narrowness have to be displayed. As Professor Ritchie said:--"The 'legitimate materialism of the sciences' simply means temporary and convenient abstraction from the cognitive conditions under which there are 'facts' or 'objects' for us at all; it is 'dogmatic materialism' which is metaphysics of the bad sort."

It will be probably instructive, and it may be sufficient, if I show that two great leaders in scientific thought (one the greatest of all men of science who have yet lived), though well aware of much that could be said positively on the materialistic side, and very willing to admit or even to extend the province of science or exact knowledge to the uttermost, yet were very far from being philosophic materialists or from imagining that other modes of regarding the universe were thereby excluded.

Great leaders of thought, in fact, are not accustomed to take a narrow view of existence, or to suppose that one mode of regarding it, or one set of formulae expressing it, can possibly be sufficient and complete.

Even a sheet of paper has two sides: a terrestrial globe presents different aspects from different points of view; a crystal has a variety of facets; and the totality of existence is not likely to be more simple than any of these--is not likely to be readily expressible in any form of words, or to be thoroughly conceivable by any human mind.

It may be well to remember that Sir Isaac Newton was a Theist of the most p.r.o.nounced and thorough conviction, although he had a great deal to do with the reduction of the major Cosmos to mechanics, _i.e._, with its explanation by the elaborated machinery of simple forces; and he conceived it possible that, in the progress of science, this process of reduction to mechanics would continue till it embraced nearly all the phenomena of nature. (See extract below.) That, indeed, has been the effort of science ever since, and therein lies the legitimate basis for materialistic statements, though not for a materialistic philosophy.

The following sound remarks concerning Newton are taken from Huxley's "Hume," p. 246:--

"Newton demonstrated all the host of heaven to be but the elements of a vast mechanism, regulated by the same laws as those which express the falling of a stone to the ground. There is a pa.s.sage in the preface to the first edition of the 'Principia' which shows that Newton was penetrated, as completely as Descartes, with the belief that all the phenomena of nature are expressible in terms of matter and motion:--

"'Would that the rest of the phenomena of nature could be deduced by a like kind of reasoning from mechanical principles. For many circ.u.mstances lead me to suspect that all these phenomena may depend upon certain forces, in virtue of which the particles of bodies, by causes not yet known, are either mutually impelled against one another, and cohere into regular figures, or repel and recede from one another; which forces being unknown, philosophers have as yet explored nature in vain. But I hope that, either by this method of philosophizing, or by some other and better, the principles here laid down may throw some light upon the matter.'"

Here is a full-blown antic.i.p.ation of an intelligible exposition of the Universe in terms of matter and force--the substantial basis of what smaller men call materialism and develop into what they consider to be a materialistic philosophy. But there is no necessity for any such scheme; and Professor Huxley himself, who is commonly spoken of by half-informed people as if he were a philosophic materialist, was really nothing of the kind; for although, like Newton, fully imbued with the mechanical doctrine, and of course far better informed concerning the biological departments of nature, and the discoveries which have in the last century been made,--and though he rightly regarded it as his mission to make the scientific point of view clear to his benighted contemporaries, and was full of enthusiasm for the facts on which materialists take their stand,--he saw clearly that these alone were insufficient for a philosophy. The following extracts from the Hume volume will show that he entirely repudiated materialism as a satisfactory or complete philosophical system, and that he was especially severe on gratuitous denials applied to provinces beyond our scope:--

"While it is the summit of human wisdom to learn the limit of our faculties, it may be wise to recollect that we have no more right to make denials, than to put forth affirmatives, about what lies beyond that limit. Whether either mind or matter has a 'substance' or not, is a problem which we are incompetent to discuss: and it is just as likely that the common notions upon the subject should be correct as any others.... 'The same principles which, at first view, lead to scepticism, pursued to a certain point, bring men back to common sense'" (p. 282).

"Moreover, the ultimate forms of existence which we distinguish in our little speck of the universe are, possibly, only two out of infinite varieties of existence, not only a.n.a.logous to matter and a.n.a.logous to mind, but of kinds which we are not competent so much as to conceive,--in the midst of which, indeed, we might be set down, with no more notion of what was about us, than the worm in a flower-pot, on a London balcony, has of the life of the great city" (p. 286).

And again on pp. 251 and 279:--

"It is worth any amount of trouble to ... know by one's own knowledge the great truth ... that the honest and rigorous following up of the argument which leads us to 'materialism' inevitably carries us beyond it."

"To sum up. If the materialist affirms that the universe and all its phenomena are resolvable into matter and motion, Berkeley replies, True; but what you call matter and motion are known to us only as forms of consciousness; their being is to be conceived or known; and the existence of a state of consciousness apart from a thinking mind is a contradiction in terms.

"I conceive that this reasoning is irrefragable. And, therefore, if I were obliged to choose between absolute materialism and absolute idealism, I should feel compelled to accept the latter alternative."

Let the jubilant but uninstructed and comparatively ignorant amateur materialist therefore beware, and bethink himself twice or even thrice before he conceives that he understands the universe and is competent to pour scorn upon the intuitions and perceptions of great men in what may be to him alien regions of thought and experience.

Let him explain, if he can, what he means by his own ident.i.ty, or the ident.i.ty of any thinking or living being, which at different times consists of a totally different set of material particles. Something there clearly is which confers personal ident.i.ty and const.i.tutes an individual: it is a property characteristic of every form of life, even the humblest; but it is not yet explained or understood, and it is no answer to a.s.sert gratuitously that there is some fundamental substance or material basis on which that ident.i.ty depends, any more than it is an explanation to say that it depends upon a soul. These are all forms of words. As Hume says, quoted by Huxley with approval, in the work already cited, p. 194:--

"It is impossible to attach any definite meaning to the word 'substance,' when employed for the hypothetical substratum of soul and matter.... If it be said that our personal ident.i.ty requires the a.s.sumption of a substance which remains the same while the accidents of perception s.h.i.+ft and change, the question arises what is meant by personal ident.i.ty?... A plant or an animal, in the course of its existence, from the condition of an egg or seed to the end of life, remains the same neither in form, nor in structure, nor in the matter of which it is composed: every attribute it possesses is constantly changing, and yet we say that it is always one and the same individual"

(p. 194).

And in his own preface to the Hume volume Huxley expresses himself forcibly thus--equally antagonistic as was his wont to both ostensible friend and ostensible foe, as soon as they got off what he considered the straight path:--

"That which it may be well for us not to forget is, that the first-recorded judicial murder of a scientific thinker [Socrates] was compa.s.sed and effected, not by a despot, nor by priests, but was brought about by eloquent demagogues.... Clear knowledge of what one does not know is just as important as knowing what one does know....

"The development of exact natural knowledge in all its vast range, from physics to history and criticism, is the consequence of the working out, in this province, of the resolution to 'take nothing for truth without clear knowledge that it is such'; to consider all beliefs open to criticism; to regard the value of authority as neither greater nor less, than as much as it can prove itself to be worth. The modern spirit is not the spirit 'which always denies,' delighting only in destruction; still less is it that which builds castles in the air rather than not construct; it is that spirit which works and will work 'without haste and without rest,' gathering harvest after harvest of truth into its barns, and devouring error with unquenchable fire" (p. viii).

The harvesting of truth is a fairly safe operation, for if some falsehood be inadvertently harvested along with the grain we may hope that, having a less robust and hardy nature, it will before long be detected by its decaying odour; but the rooting up and devouring of error with unquenchable fire is a more dangerous enterprise, inasmuch as flames are apt to spread beyond our control; and the lack of infallibility in the selection of error may to future generations become painfully apparent.

The phrase represents a good healthy energetic mood however, and in a world liable to become overgrown with weeds and choked with refuse, the cleansing work of a firebrand may from time to time be a necessity, in order that the free wind of heaven and the sunlight may once more reach the fertile soil.

But it is unfair to think of Huxley even when young as a firebrand, though it is true that he was to some extent a man of war, and though the fierce and consuming mood is rather more prominent in his early writings than in his later work.

A fighting att.i.tude was inevitable forty years ago, because then the truths of biology were being received with hostility, and the free science and philosophy of a later time seemed likely to have a poor chance of life. But the world has changed or is changing now, the wholesome influences of fire have done their work, and it would be a rather barbarous anachronism to apply the same agency among the young green shoots of healthy learning which are springing up in the cleared ground.

OLIVER LODGE.

1906.

Among the earlier published works of T. H. Huxley (1825-1895), and of the essays contained in this volume: "The Darwinian Hypothesis" first appeared in the _Times_, Dec. 26, 1859; "On the Educational Value of the Natural History Sciences" (Address given at St. Martin's Hall), was published in 1854; "Time and Life" (_Macmillan's Magazine_), Dec. 1859; "The Origin of Species" (_Westminster Review_), April 1860; "A Lobster: or, The Study of Zoology," 1861. "Geological Contemporaneity and Persistent Types of Life" (Address to Geological Society), 1862, was re-published in "Lay Sermons," vol. viii.; "Six Lectures to Working Men on the Phenomena of Organic Nature," 1863, in "Collected Essays," vol.

vii. "Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature," 1863. Of his other works, the translation by Huxley and Busk of "Kolliker's Manual of Human Histology," appeared in 1853. "Lectures on the Elements of Comparative Anatomy," "Elementary Atlas of Comparative Osteology"; two Science Lectures, "The Circulation of the Blood" and "Corals and Coral Reefs,"

and "Lessons in Elementary Physiology," in 1866. "Introduction to the Cla.s.sification of Animals," 1869. "Lay Sermons, Essays, and Reviews,"

1870. "Critiques and Addresses," 1873. "On Yeast: A Lecture," 1872. "A Manual of the Anatomy of Vertebrated Animals," 1871. "Manual of the Anatomy of Invertebrated Animals," 1877. "American Addresses," 1877.

"Physiography," 1877. "Hume" in "English Men of Letters," 1878. "The Crayfish: an Introduction to the Study of Zoology," 1880. "Science and Culture, and other Essays," 1881. "Essays upon some Controverted Questions," 1892. "Evolution and Ethics" (the Romanes Lecture), 1893.

Huxley also a.s.sisted in editing the series of Science Primers published by Messrs. Macmillan, and contributed the introductory volume himself.

The "Collected Essays," in nine vols., containing all that he cared to preserve, 1893. "The Scientific Memoirs of T. H. Huxley," edited by Professor Michael Foster and Professor E. Ray Lankester, in five vols., 1898-1903. His "Life and Letters," edited by his son, Leonard Huxley, was published in 1900.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Skeletons of the_

GIBBON. ORANG. CHIMPANZEE. GORILLA. MAN.

_Photographically reduced from Diagrams of the natural size_ (_except that of the Gibbon, which was twice as large as nature_), _drawn by Mr.