CHAPTER XIII

SCIENCE AND SUPERSTITION--HUXLEY

When the ancient Humanist, Protagoras, said, “Man is the measure of all things,” he probably did not mean that all things may be measured by man, for in his following sentence he is sceptical of our knowledge of many things. He meant rather that all our measurements are human. This independence of supernaturalism was not always characteristic of educated minds of antiquity, but it is one of the distinguishing features of the educational tradition which we have derived from Greece and Rome. Thus Aristotle would establish ethics in the life of reason. This same naturalistic bias also inspires those early attempts at science which were broken off under the influence of Christianity.

The Renaissance was accompanied by a re-awakened interest in nature, and in human nature as part of nature as a whole. The trend toward naturalism is seen in art, in the resumption of scientific research and experimentation, and in the effort to supplant scholastic theology by the study of human letters. To Da Vinci, for instance, science, art, and letters were but the varied aspects of the same cultural awakening. But for the greater number of those who felt the influence of the Renaissance, science and letters became quite separate interests. The new learning of the Humanists was almost exclusively a literary scholarship. Erasmus and his followers had very little interest in natural science. They found in classic literature a body of mature wisdom ready to hand. Science on the contrary, was obliged to begin _de novo_, and slowly construct its instruments of thought, building, gradually a new system of knowledge. The brunt of the conflict with scholastic education fell upon the humanists. The real renaissance of science did not take place until the seventeenth century.

Meanwhile the Reformation had caused a revival of religious interest, and in Protestant countries like England, and later America, the influence of religion upon higher learning remained powerful. It permitted the classical tradition to survive in letter rather than in spirit. The naturalistic implications of the classics were ignored; commentators whenever possible read into the texts the conventional beliefs and sentiments of Protestantism. Humanism became “traditional education,” a new scholasticism, formal and innocuous, a mark of intellectual respectability, a “refining” influence, an embroidery of familiar quotation in the speech of parsons and country squires.

Successive generations of grown-up schoolboys in Gothic halls, laboriously translated, over and over again, hackneyed passages from a literature that in the fifteenth century had been carried about like the fire of Prometheus, kindling defiance to Heaven all over Europe. Often men could think of no better reason for the study of the ancient classics than that in the tedium and monotony of language drill there was a “discipline” which was good for the soul. The student’s attention was centered upon the niceties of construction and upon the task of memorizing rules of grammar and a vocabulary, all stuffed into his head in the most artificial manner conceivable. He was not likely to be puzzled over the discovery that there might be something spiritually irreconcilable between Lucretius and the Thirty Nine Articles, or between the dialectic of Socrates and the Westminster confession of faith.

There is a world of difference between this _denatured_ Humanism and that of Erasmus or Montaigne. That this traditional education made for polish and good breeding cannot be denied. Neither, I think, can it be denied that there was something sterile and illiberal in Protestant-classical education. It is significant that both the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century and the progress of science in the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries took place chiefly outside the established universities and sometimes in spite of their opposition.

I do not see how the situation could well have been otherwise. In the first place the older Humanists themselves dealt the naturalism of the ancients and such of it as was again coming to life a severe blow when they championed letters and remained indifferent to science. In the second place, the Reformation quite side-tracked the revival of learning, superseded it, and took over into its own service only so much of it as it found congenial to its religious interests. It was a mass movement, an attempt at a restatement of Christianity in terms of the philosophy of the common man, a philosophy to which the questioning, enlightened common sense and worldly wisdom of a Montaigne, a Voltaire or a Hume is never very congenial. Santayana says, “The philosophy of the common man is an old wife that gives him no pleasure, yet he cannot do without her, and resents any aspersions that strangers may cast on her character.

“Of this homely philosophy the tender cuticle is religious belief; really the least vital and most arbitrary part of human opinion, the outer ring, as it were, of the fortifications of prejudice, but for that very reason the most jealously defended; since it is on being attacked there, at the least defensible point, that rage and alarm at being attacked at all are first aroused in the citadel. People are not naturally sceptics, wondering if a single one of their intellectual habits can be reasonably preserved; they are dogmatists angrily confident of maintaining them all. Integral minds, pupils of a single coherent tradition, regard their religion, whatever it may be, as certain, as sublime, and as the only rational basis of morality and policy. Yet in fact religious belief is terribly precarious, partly because it is arbitrary, so that in the next tribe or in the next century it will wear quite a different form; and partly because, when genuine, it is spontaneous and continually remodelled, like poetry, in the heart that gives it birth. A man of the world soon learns to discredit established religions on account of their variety and absurdity, although he may good-naturedly continue to conform to his own; and a mystic before long begins fervently to condemn current dogmas, on account of his own different inspiration. Without philosophical criticism, therefore, mere experience and good sense suggest that all positive religions are false, or at least (which is enough for my present purpose) that they are all fantastic and insecure.”

Speaking of the Reformation and its relation to science, Whitehead says, “We cannot look upon it as introducing a new principle into human life.” Perhaps he is inclined to over-emphasize the assertions of the Reformers that they were only restoring what had been forgotten. But he says, “It is quite otherwise with the rise of modern science. In every way it contrasts with the contemporary religious movement. The Reformation was a popular uprising and for a century and a half drenched Europe in blood. The beginnings of the scientific movement were confined to a minority among the intellectual élite.”

It is doubtless because the Humanists remained relatively indifferent to science, that its early struggles with theology were comparatively mild. It was permitted to make remarkable progress in the seventeenth century without raising an issue too great for its strength. It is interesting to note that when in the nineteenth century the conflict of natural science with theology became acute, science was at the same time engaged in a struggle for recognition by the official educational system in which the classical tradition held sway.

The outstanding public champion of science in this conflict was Thomas H. Huxley. He could say of university education in England in the year 1868, that the colleges no longer promoted research in science, and were hardly more than “boarding schools for bigger boys.” Once they had been homes for the life study of the most abstruse and important branches of knowledge.

“I believe there can be no doubt that the foreigner who should wish to become acquainted with the scientific, or the literary, activity of modern England, would simply lose his time and his pains if he visited our universities with that object.

“The countrymen of Grote and of Mill, of Faraday, of Robert Brown, of Lyell, and Darwin, to go no further back than the contemporaries of men of middle age, can afford to smile at such a suggestion. England can show now, and she has been able to show in every generation since civilization spread over the West, individual men who hold their own against the world, and keep alive the old tradition of her intellectual eminence.

“But in the majority of cases, these men are what they are in virtue of their native intellectual force, and of a strength of character which will not recognise impediments. They are not trained in the courts of the Temple of Science, but storm the walls of that edifice in all sorts of irregular ways, and with much loss of time and power, in order to obtain their legitimate positions.

“Our universities not only do not encourage such men; do not offer them positions, in which it should be their highest duty to do, thoroughly, that which they are most capable of doing; but, as far as possible, university training shuts out of the minds of those among them, who are subjected to it, the prospect that there is anything in the world for which they are specially fitted.--Imagine the success of the attempt to still the intellectual hunger of any of the men I have mentioned, by putting before him, as the object of existence, the successful mimicry of the measure of a Greek song, or the roll of Ciceronian prose!”

Twelve years later Huxley was still waging his contest for the admission of science to the curricula of school and college against an opposition the obstinacy of which is a little difficult for us today to understand.

“For I hold very strongly by two convictions--The first is, that neither the discipline nor the subject-matter of classical education is of such direct value to the student of physical science as to justify the expenditure of valuable time upon either; and the second is, that for the purpose of attaining real culture, an exclusively scientific education is at least as effectual as an exclusively literary education.

“I need hardly point out to you that these opinions, especially the latter, are diametrically opposed to those of the great majority of educated Englishmen, influenced as they are by school and university traditions. In their belief, culture is obtainable only by a liberal education; and a liberal education is synonymous, not merely with education and instruction in literature, but in one particular form of literature, namely, that of Greek and Roman antiquity. They hold that the man who has learned Latin and Greek, however little, is educated; while he who is versed in other branches of knowledge, however deeply, is a more or less respectable specialist, not admissable into the cultured caste. The stamp of the educated man, the University degree, is not for him.”

“The representatives of the Humanists, in the nineteenth century, take their stand upon classical education as the sole avenue to culture, as firmly as if we were still in the age of Renascence. Yet, surely, the present intellectual relations of the modern and the ancient worlds are profoundly different from those which obtained three centuries ago. Leaving aside the existence of a great and characteristic modern literature, of modern painting, and, especially of modern music, there is one feature of the present state of the civilized world which separates it more widely from the Renascence, than the Renascence was separated from the middle ages.

“This distinctive character of our own times lies in the vast and constantly increasing part which is played by natural knowledge. Not only is our daily life shaped by it, not only does the prosperity of millions of men depend upon it, but our whole theory of life has long been influenced, consciously or unconsciously, by the general conceptions of the universe, which have been forced upon us by physical science.”

“The scientist, no longer disposed to remain on the defensive with the usual apology for science, carries the battle into the opposing camp and indicts the opposition, with some justice I think, for its failure even when judged by its own traditional standards of education.

“There is no great force in the _tu quoque_ argument, or else the advocates of scientific education might fairly enough retort upon the modern Humanists that they may be learned specialists, but that they possess no such sound foundation for a criticism of life as deserves the name of culture. And, indeed, if we were disposed to be cruel, we might urge that the Humanists have brought this reproach upon themselves, not because they are too full of the spirit of the ancient Greek, but because they lack it.

“The period of the Renascence is commonly called that of the “Revival of Letters,” as if the influences then brought to bear upon the mind of Western Europe had been wholly exhausted in the field of literature. I think it is very commonly forgotten that the revival of science, effected by the same agency, although less conspicuous, was not less momentous....

“We cannot know all the best thoughts and sayings of the Greeks unless we know what they thought about natural phenomena. We cannot fully apprehend their criticism of life unless we understand the extent to which that criticism was affected by scientific conceptions. We falsely pretend to be the inheritors of their culture, unless we are penetrated, as the best minds among them were, with an unhesitating faith that the free employment of reason, in accordance with scientific method, is the sole method of reaching truth.

“Thus I venture to think that the pretensions of our modern Humanists to the possession of the monopoly of culture and to the exclusive inheritance of the spirit of antiquity must be abated, if not abandoned.”

Huxley was one of the few educators of his time who ought to have seen clearly that in the education of the ancients there was no conflict of interest between science and letters; the two were one in the naturalistic minds of the Greeks. He is aware of the fact that both science and letters were revived by the Renaissance, but it would seem that he permits his zeal in the cause of scientific training to force him at times into a rather one-sided and partisan position.

“But for those who mean to make science their serious occupation; or who intend to follow the profession of medicine; or who have to enter early upon the business of life; for all these, in my opinion, classical education is a mistake; and it is for this reason that I am glad to see ‘mere literary education and instruction’ shut out from the curriculum of Sir Josiah Mason’s College, seeing that its inclusion would probably lead to the introduction of the ordinary smattering of Latin and Greek....”

“The great peculiarity of scientific training, that in virtue of which it cannot be replaced by any other discipline whatsoever, is this bringing of the mind directly into contact with fact, and practising the intellect in the completest form of induction; that is to say, in drawing conclusions from particular facts made known by immediate observation of nature.”

The struggle for recognition of the liberalizing educational value of science was carried to successful issue in the nineteenth century. In backward communities, Fundamentalism still sets its face against certain of the anti-supernaturalist implications of science, and it is always possible that if at any time the populace now dazzled by the “wonders” of science, should suspect the full meaning of the world-view which science would substitute for the older anthropomorphic ideas about the universe, there may be a wide-spread popular reaction against it in the name of religion. But at present in educational institutions generally, scientific courses tend to predominate over the classical. Most of the struggles for “academic freedom” and most of the live problems in education revolve about the teaching of the sciences. A vastly greater number of minds are today set free from dogma and superstition and childish deference to authority by methods of scientific research than by the study of the classics. The latter is on the decline and I suppose must continue to be so until Humanism again possesses that vitality and naturalism, and independence of judgment which men had when the Greeks set out to discover the Good Life.

Dewey says that without initiation into the scientific spirit one is not in possession of the best tools which humanity has so far devised for effectively directed reflection. In it may be realized that desire for exact knowledge as different from mere opinion which the ancients sought. It tests all things in the light of experiment and by appeal to cold objective fact. It is often said that science is Reason in contrast with Faith. Certainly the scientist cannot in his research permit himself to be swayed by religious belief and remain scientific. He must accept no conclusion on authority or because he wishes to believe it. But the scientific mind is not, as a matter of fact, as strictly rationalistic as was the scholastic mind. The logic of the latter is a formal vindication of The Truth conceived in advance of knowledge of fact. The reasoning of the former proceeds by a succession of shrewd guesses which are held to be mere hypothesis until verified by the facts. This necessity of holding judgment in abeyance, and of being willing to discard any belief or postulate that may not be confirmed by objective reality, has the greatest educational value. In spite of the everlasting deceitfulness and conceit of human nature and notwithstanding the fact that pompous ignorance and fraud are often palmed off upon the public as scientific knowledge, I should say, precisely because of these things, training in scientific methods is the best device available to the educator for instilling into the human mind some measure of respect for truth.

To this end Huxley would introduce scientific experimentation into the elementary school and would establish “scientific Sunday schools,”

“Would there really be anything wrong in using part of Sunday for the purpose of instructing those who have no other leisure, in a knowledge of the phenomena of Nature, and of man’s relation to Nature?

“I should like to see a scientific Sunday-school in every parish, not for the purpose of superseding any existing means of teaching the people the things that are for their good, but side by side with them. I cannot but think that there is room for all of us to work in helping to bridge over the great abyss of ignorance which lies at our feet.

“And if any of the ecclesiastical persons to whom I have referred object that they find it derogatory to the honour of the God whom they worship, to awaken the minds of the young to the infinite wonder and majesty of the works which they proclaim His, and to teach them those laws which must needs be His laws, and therefore of all things needful for man to know--I can only recommend them to be let blood and put on low diet. There must be something very wrong going on in the instrument of logic if it turns out such conclusions from such premises.”

There is an intellectual cleanness, something downright and honest about the scientific pursuit of knowledge, and this uncompromising mental integrity characterizes everything that Huxley said and did. There is nothing shifty in a mind trained as his was. His is like a cool north breeze on one of those clear summer days that sometimes follow a period of sultriness, fog and rain. If things are a little too sharply outlined, they are at least recognized for what they are. No evasive mistiness obscures the landscape. To Huxley the foundation of morality is to give up pretending to believe that for which there is no evidence. He held that the lowest depths to which the human race could fall--after knowing what science now reveals of nature--would be to go back and deceive itself with comforting fictions. You will remember his correspondence with Kingsley when death had entered his home. The grief-stricken Huxley refused the consolations of a faith in which he could not whole-heartedly believe. Like Socrates and Montaigne and many educated men today, Huxley was candidly agnostic with respect to matters which lie beyond the radius of human knowledge.

Huxley was a determinist, but it is doubtful if he was a materialist. At least he held to a materialism which in one sense might be reconciled with a form of idealism. In the address in honor of Joseph Priestley he said,

“Without containing much that will be new to the readers or Hobbs, Spinoza, Collins, Hume, and Hartley, and indeed, while making no pretensions to originality, Priestley’s ‘Disquisitions relating to Matter and Spirit,’ and his ‘Doctrine of Philosophical Necessity Illustrated,’ are among the most powerful, clear, and unflinching expositions of materialism and necessarianism which exist in the English language, and are still well worth reading.

“Priestley denied the freedom of the will in the sense of its self-determination; he denied the existence of a soul distinct from the body; and as a natural consequence, he denied the natural immortality of man.

“In relation to these matters English opinion a century ago was very much what it is now.

“A man may be a necessarian without incurring graver reproach than that implied in being called a gloomy fanatic, necessarianism, though very shocking, having a note of Calvinistic orthodoxy; but, if a man is a materialist; or, if good authorities say he is and must be so, in spite of his assertion to the contrary; or, if he acknowledge himself unable to see good reasons for believing in the natural immortality of man, respectable folks look upon him as an unsafe neighbour of a cashbox, as an actual or potential sensualist, the more virtuous in outward seeming, the more certainly loaded with secret ‘grave personal sins.’

“... I must confess that what interests me most about Priestley’s materialism, is the evidence that he saw dimly the seed of destruction which such materialism carries within its own bosom. In the course of his reading for his ‘History of Discoveries relating to Vision, Light, and Colours,’ he had come upon the speculations of Boscovich and Michell, and had been led to admit the sufficiently obvious truth that our knowledge of matter is a knowledge of its properties; and that of its substance--if it have a substance--we know nothing. And this led to the further admission that, so far as we can know, there may be no difference between the substance of matter and the substance of spirit (‘Disquisitions, p. 16’). A step farther would have shown Priestley that his materialism was, essentially, very little different from the Idealism of his contemporary, the Bishop of Cloyne.”

Perhaps William James may have had Huxley or his type in mind when he wrote his famous passage about learning “to stand this universe.” Yet I suspect that Huxley’s universe was more simple and benevolent, more naïvely conceived than was that of James. Huxley was to the end a rationalist, and lived and worked in a period when Nature was thought to be essentially reasonable. Man need only learn the laws of nature and obey them to become wise and happy and good. The aim of education was to acquaint the student with the laws of nature.

“Well, what I mean by Education is learning the rules of this mighty game. In other words, education is the instruction of the intellect in the laws of Nature, under which name I include not merely things and their forces, but men and their ways; and the fashioning of the affections and of the will into an earnest and loving desire to move in harmony with those laws. For me, education means neither more nor less than this....

“Suppose it were perfectly certain that the life and fortune of every one of us would, one day or other, depend upon his winning or losing a game of chess. Don’t you think that we should all consider it to be a primary duty to learn at least the names and the moves of the pieces; to have a notion of a gambit, and a keen eye for all the means of giving and getting out of check?

“Yet it is a very plain and elementary truth, that the life, the fortune, and the happiness of every one of us, and, more or less, of those who are connected with us, do depend upon our knowing something of the rules of a game infinitely more difficult and complicated than chess. It is a game which has been played for untold ages, every man and woman of us being one of the two players in a game of his or her own. The chess-board is the world, the pieces are the phenomena of the universe, the rules of the game are what we call the laws of Nature. The player on the other side is hidden from us. We know that his play is always fair, just and patient. But we also know, to our cost, that he never overlooks a mistake, or makes the smallest allowance for ignorance. To the man who plays well, the highest stakes are paid, with that sort of overflowing generosity with which the strong shows delight in strength. And one who plays ill is checkmated--without haste, but without remorse.

“My metaphor will remind some of you of the famous picture in which Retzsch has depicted Satan playing at chess with man for his soul. Substitute for the mocking friend in that picture a calm, strong angel who is playing for love, as we say, and would rather lose than win--and I should accept it as an image of human life....

“That man, I think, has had a liberal education who has been so trained in youth that his body is the ready servant of his will, and does with ease and pleasure all the work that, as a mechanism, it is capable of; whose intellect is a clear, cold, logic engine, with all its parts of equal strength, and in smooth working order; ready, like a steam engine, to be turned to any kind of work, and spin the gossamers as well as forge the anchors of the mind; whose mind is stored with a knowledge of the great and fundamental truths of Nature and of the laws of her operations; one who, no stunted ascetic, is full of life and fire, but whose passions are trained to come to heel by a vigorous will, the servant of a tender conscience; who has learned to love all beauty, whether of Nature or of art, to hate all vileness, and to respect others as himself.

“Such an one and no other, I conceive, has had a liberal education; for he is, as completely as a man can be, in harmony with Nature. He will make the best of her, and she of him. They will get on together rarely; she as his ever beneficent mother; he as her mouthpiece, her conscious self, her minister and interpreter.”

But surely liberal education is more than becoming the mouthpiece of a benevolent nature. It seems to me that Huxley omits one of the essentials. Just as the nineteenth century Humanists, because of their neglect of science, possessed only a distorted and one-sided view of Humanist education, so it would seem to me that nineteenth century science in its opposition to traditional education, failed to see that science is itself a part of Humanism. It is not merely the discovery of given “Laws” which exist independently in a benevolent and rational universe. It is the observation of certain relationships and recurrences and the statement of these things in general terms that will give them significance for _human beings_. What nature is aside from the fact that we are interested spectators does not concern us. Science grows out of the fact that we are more interested in some things than in others. It is a human achievement; it is one of the answers that mankind gives to the riddle of existence. It is not existence which gives that answer, it is man. And education must not only seek knowledge of the facts of nature, but having obtained such knowledge, _must try to understand what to do about it_. Now that we understand our natural environment, what kind of life can we best achieve with it? What valuations have men put upon deeds and things? What values is it possible to achieve? Our education is not done when we have learned Nature’s _yes_ and _no_; we have our own _yes_ and _no_ to give.

Scientists quietly observing certain aspects of reality--those which lend themselves to knowing as a specialized undertaking--are happy to find that their abstract conceptions mutually imply and support one another in an ordered system of knowledge. Their own reason which they are thus able to impose upon nature, they believe they have discovered in nature itself. Hence nature appears to be more ordered than it really is, and to be essentially reasonable and beneficent. Compare Huxley’s picture of nature as a beneficent mother of whom the educated mind “makes the best, and she of him,” he “her conscious self, her minister and interpreter,” with William James’ statement about “this partially hospitable and ‘stepmotherly’ world of ours.” The latter is surely the more profound and correct view. Water is not only H₂O, it may drown you or quench your thirst. Fire is not merely a process of oxidation, it is hot. It may be your willing servant, or your relentless enemy. The modification of species which nineteenth century scientists held to be the outcome of natural selection is not what natural selection means to the organisms which experienced it. To them it is a relentless struggle for a precarious and fleeting existence in which satisfactions and victories are mingled with terror and starvation and agony. And man placed in the midst of such a world seeks education not only that he may interpret its happenings to an intelligence which is part of the natural process, but that he may select wisely among the alternatives which Nature presents to him, lift himself above chaos and the slime, and achieve an existence that, at least while it lasts, has some significance and quality of decency and worth.

It is to this end that science is education; a true Humanism is impossible without it. Such a Humanism is as anti-supernaturalistic as determinism. But it is naturalism with mankind, however, not merely pictured as a passive resultant of natural forces, but actively selecting and creating value. As Huxley himself says, its aim is to provide criteria for a “criticism of life.”

“Moreover this scientific ‘criticism of life’ presents itself to us with different credentials from any other. It appeals not to authority, nor to what anybody may have thought or said, but to nature. It admits that all our interpretations of natural fact are more or less imperfect and symbolic, and bids the learner seek for the truth not among words but among things. It warns us that the assertion which outstrips evidence is not only a blunder but a crime.”

He saw a new culture in process of development, one which would enlist the whole spiritual life of mankind,

“The scenes are shifting the great theatre of the world. The act which commenced with the Protestant Reformation is nearly played out, and a wider and deeper change than that effected three centuries ago--a reformation, or rather a revolution of thought, the extremes of which are represented by the intellectual heirs of John of Leyden and of Ignatius Loyola, rather than by those of Luther and of Leo--is waiting to come on, nay, visible behind the scenes to those who have good eyes. Men are beginning, once more, to awake to the fact that matters of belief and of speculation are of absolutely infinite practical importance; and are drawing off from that sunny country ‘where it is always afternoon’--the sleepy hollow of broad indifferentism--to range themselves under their natural banners. Change is in the air. It is whirling feather-heads into all sorts of eccentric orbits, and filling the steadiest with a sense of insecurity. It insists on reopening all questions and asking all institutions, however venerable, by what right they exist, and whether they are, or are not, in harmony with the real or supposed wants of mankind.”

Huxley’s services to education were more than his struggle for the recognition of the educational value of science. His own contributions to the science of biology and his able championing of the case which Darwin had made in favor of the hypotheses of evolution did much to place the biological sciences in their present position of preëminence and to aid in placing both education and modern thought upon the basis of a philosophy of evolution.

After receiving his degree in medicine, Huxley was appointed to the position of assistant surgeon in the British navy. As he cruised about on the war-ship ‘Rattlesnake,’ he began his studies of marine animals. Darwin, you will remember, had also spent long months on southern seas as government naturalist assigned to the Beagle. During the years that followed each had risen to a high position as a British scientist, conducting research, publishing papers, making new discoveries, all of which contributed to make the nineteenth century, as John Fiske said, “the century of science.”

During the years when Darwin was patiently elaborating the theory of “descent with modification” which was destined within his own lifetime to bring about a revolutionary transformation in the philosophy of nature, Huxley did much to organize the science of Biology as a definite branch of natural history. His great energy and industry, his passion for exact knowledge and his genius for clear and comprehensive statement made him one of the outstanding scientists of England. As professor of Natural History at the Royal School of Mines, and later in the Royal College of Surgeons, and as publicist and member of numerous commissions on science and education, he was in a position to throw a tremendous weight of influence to the support of his convictions, should he be drawn into a scientific controversy.

When in 1859 Darwin published the “Origin of Species,” Huxley was one of the small group of eminent scientists whose favorable judgment Darwin felt would be necessary if the theory of natural selection were to command the attention of the scientific world. Darwin did not invent the doctrine of evolution. This idea had from time to time suggested itself to men’s minds whenever a naturalistic account of creation was attempted. The increase of knowledge of comparative anatomy, of geology and of zoölogy, and the discovery of certain structural likenesses and differences among both living organisms and the fossil remains which were found in the several layers of the earth’s surface, could not fail to suggest to many minds the thought that perhaps all forms of life might be related in one comprehensive evolutionary process. Although the evidence against the dogma of special creation was rapidly accumulating, no valid explanation had been found. Lamarcks’ theory that the structural modifications which characterize the various species of organisms were the result of effort and use and of special energizing and development of various organs, was under discussion. The theory did not, however, interest Huxley, because it implied that modifications which occurred as a result of effort and use could be inherited, a belief for which there was not sufficient evidence.

Darwin’s book put the whole problem in a new light, and stated the hypotheses of organic evolution as an alternative to “special creation” in terms which were comprehensible to a mind trained in natural science. Heretofore a mysterious principle of development had been substituted for a miracle of creation. Darwin did not invoke any such principle but with good scientific logic sought his explanation of the origin of species in the casual connections among observable facts.

It is not my purpose now to enter upon a discussion of Darwinism, or its present status in biology, a general understanding of which I think should be part of the education of a modern man. I suspect that many moderns who “believe in evolution” merely cherish a popular faith in some mystical law of unusual progress, such as is expressed in the verse, “Some call it evolution and some God.”

Huxley was uncompromisingly opposed to all such romantic theologizing in science. He was moreover, aware, as Darwin himself was, of the difficulties of Darwin’s theory. But he grasped the significance of what Darwin had done and saw the ground upon which he had placed the discussion of the problem, and he held that in the main Darwin was correct. Gracefully and courageously he took his stand at Darwin’s side. In various addresses, essays, books, he drew upon his extensive knowledge for evidence in support of the theory. In “Man’s Place in Nature” he uncompromisingly placed the origin and development of the human race within the process of the evolution of animal organisms. He did not remain indifferent to the storm of ecclesiastical indignation and popular abuse and ridicule with which a grateful humanity greeted the most important scientific discovery of the century. He accepted the challenge, and during the decades that followed 1860 he was probably the outstanding champion in England, not only of evolution, but of science itself. In 1925, upon the centennial of his birth, his grandson, Julian Huxley wrote,

“Of the general truth of the evolutionary hypothesis, its enormous value to biology, and the necessary reorientation which it would give to the general current of thought, he had no doubts; nor did he spare himself in the cause. It is sometimes as well, in these easier-going and theologically more tolerant days, when we are reaping what he and others like him sowed, and may sometimes be tempted to think of his criticism as essentially destructive, to remember what power of inertia, what violence of the odium theologicum there was in the opposition. ‘Professor Huxley’ became a sort of bogy in orthodox lower middle-class families, almost as ‘Boney’ had done for the nation in earlier days. He was attacked as irreligious, immoral, unscrupulous, on the platform, in the press, by letter. That sort of opposition cannot be persuaded; it must die out or be destroyed.”

The scholar confronted by the fury and stupidity of the mob, and counted a fool for his pains when he strives to induce it to listen to reason, has often turned aside in disgust. Henceforth he will write and speak for the learned few. Let the masses, who think that a scientific demonstration may be satisfactorily refuted with derision and slander, consume themselves in their own ignorance. They have made it clear that learning is not for such as they. In the Theatetus Plato tells us of the discomfiture of the philosopher in the marketplace. As “the rabble” is in all times heedless or hostile to reason, there has often developed the idea that any belief that is popular is thereby shown to be untrue and vulgar. Cato at once became suspicious of himself when any utterance of his met with applause. Among would-be educated minds this suspicion becomes a cult. Anything is “refined” and true to the extent that it is unpopular--and for the reason that it is not shared by the many. Today this attitude--which is really intellectual snobbishness--gains plausibility from the fact that much of the popularization of science is base caricature and misrepresentation.

It is obvious that the wider the circulation of pseudo-science, the greater is the need of genuine instruction in the elements of science and of general culture. I can see no other way by which modern learning or modern civilization may be sustained. The man on the street has power to determine which values shall survive in our common life, and which shall perish, to a degree that he never had before. He exercises this influence upon our culture in many ways both direct and indirect, and his sway is not likely to be diminished in an industrial society which increasingly tends to give social power to the various groups which compose it in direct proportion to their numerical strength.

Moreover, it is not likely that a strictly esoteric intellectualism can survive at all, much less attain that leadership which is the proper function of intelligence in human affairs in a world organized as ours is. As I have said before, our intellectual hold upon reality, even for the best trained minds, is more precarious than we think. A slight general shifting of emotional interest or of perspective--the spread, let us suppose, of Fundamentalism through lower middle class minds generally,--a sudden spasm of popular disillusionment regarding the “wonders” of science or of hostility toward scientific methods which are ever upsetting the consolations of faith,--might conceivably occur at any time, and bring the beginning of the end of all that scholars have struggled for since the Renaissance. If as Huxley said, the epoch which began with the Reformation is about played out, it is not by any means a foregone conclusion what the sequel is to be. If science and letters are to join forces in the achievement of a truly Humanist culture, this culture must be rooted in the life and thought of the community. It will not likely be again a fifteenth century Italian mimicry of the age of Cicero; neither can it support itself like a bridge over an illiterate and enslaved populace, after the fashion of ancient Athenian Humanism. This modern public can read, it is very vociferous, it has votes and purchasing power and it pays to flatter it. But there is in the modern public a small and growing minority, scattered throughout all classes in the community, who honestly desire knowledge of science and the humanities.

Professional scholarship has in the example of Huxley a splendid precedent for any attempts it may care to make to ally itself with this teachable minority. I once invited a neighboring biologist to participate with other research scholars, in a course of lectures at Cooper Union on scientific methods. He declined, because he believed that a scientist who lectured to popular audiences cheapened his reputation. I wondered if he had forgotten the great service to science rendered by Huxley, who did not think it beneath the dignity of one who was perhaps the leading biologist of England to wage the struggle for scientific advance in the presence of a public which was much less trained in the principles of natural science than the people who regularly attend the lectures at Cooper Union.

Huxley seemed to believe that the outcome of the struggle of evolution against popular ignorance and superstition was inseparable from the fate of science itself. He set himself to make knowledge of the principles of science universal. He did a work of adult education that has not been surpassed in modern times. If today there is greater freedom for scientific research and teaching, and in general a more liberal and tolerant attitude on the part of official and popular religion toward scientific discovery, our generation is in no small measure indebted to Huxley.

In reply to the commonly expressed fear that liberal education may give us a type of mind which is sceptical and ineffective, I offer Huxley. The educated man may not perhaps take sides on the ever recurrent question who is to profit at another’s expense, nor easily give his devotion to the particular Utopian scheme of social reorganization which happens to be the fashion of the reformers of his day. But if he is like Huxley, he will be alert enough when he finds that intellectual integrity and cultural progress are at stake. Like Erasmus, Huxley survives in the philosophy of modern education as a symbol of enlightenment in its struggle against obscurantism. Both insist upon the recognition of the value of one aspect of a developing educational tradition which has its origin in ancient Greece, and is in sharp contrast both with popular opinion and with mediæval scholasticism. As I have indicated, it was unfortunate that these two educational interests did not develop out of the Renaissance, as one, for a well-rounded Humanism is an integration of both. Erasmus champions the cause of “human letters” and in the end classical education degenerates into a species of Protestant scholasticism. Huxley champions science, but is unable to liberate science itself from a mechanistic philosophy which became associated with it two centuries earlier. The struggle of science with theology was but a continuation of the spirit of the Renaissance. The struggle of science against an entrenched classical tradition meant that _the Renaissance had become divided against itself_. This dualism is reflected in science down to the present time. It is revealed in Huxley’s type of agnosticism, which is really naïve in comparison with the sophisticated, mellow scepticism of Montaigne or Hume, or in our own day with that of Mr. Santayana, who sees that all knowledge is faith.

It was not so with Huxley; about the finality of the knowledge that can be brought within the scope of scientific method he had no doubt whatever. Of other knowledge he is sceptical because of want of evidence. This is courageous and honest, and, from the standpoint of the struggle in which science was then engaged with theological rationalism, the issue cannot be compromised without the surrender of science to superstition. Although Huxley is an evolutionist and clearly sees that human intelligence is part of the behavior of an organism which is itself a cross-section as it were of a process of nature, he seems to hold that morality and truth are absolute and eternal principles which exist outside the process and constitute the very basis of existence. Reason which knows these eternal principles and in which they inhere, must then also exist outside the process. But we have seen that reason is a function of the behavior of an animal. Huxley is thus a Rationalist; as much so as any Scholastic. The body of scientific knowledge which we possess is the revelation of the true nature of the facts which we experienced. It is the intellectual equivalent of reality.

But is scientific knowledge knowledge of facts taken in their wholeness, or is it in each instance knowledge of some special _aspect_ of the facts--fact reduced to abstract quality, to number and point in space and to a multiple of smaller and “more real” units all conceived in logical relationship rather than as experienced? Suppose we should say that scientific ideas do not exist independent of the minds that think them, are not equivalents of independent truths which reason discovers, but are the devices which an unusually intelligent animal constructs out of the many kinds of relationships it is able to notice amongst the objects which interest it.

From this point of view, the one most consistent, I believe, with a biology and a psychology which must take evolution into account, scientific ideas are seen to be humanly created symbols, not cerebral photographs of the ultimate nature of things. Why should the ultimate nature of a lobster be the fact that a morphologist discovers it to be an “articulate,” anymore than that I discover that it turns red when put in boiling water? Scientific ideas are instruments. Abstraction and classification are in a sense labor-saving devices, according to which we may hold that what is true for one object or event is true for all of its kind.

But the success of our thinking depends upon which of these many aspects and relationships we observe and hence how we classify them. All aspects and relationships are equally true, as James said, if true at all. Correct thinking is the thinking which seizes upon those which are relevant to our interest and purpose. And the interest and purpose are human, not inherent in the world of things. Hence the order science finds in nature is not _given_; it is the order of human thought itself. Thus science also is “human letters.”

The humanist, or organic, view of the world of science differentiates the twentieth century philosophy of nature from the mechanistic philosophy of earlier science. Mechanism, which is faith that the universe is reducible to Reason is, I hold, a survival from the old religious dualism, according to which matter and spirit were separate entities each belonging to its own world of phenomenon. The existence of Reason as an entity in itself could be taken for granted, because Reason belonged to the realm of spirit or mind, which though it existed outside the material order of being, had yet established this order in conformity to Reason.

Huxley’s agnosticism properly denies that man can have knowledge of this world of spirit, yet retains from that realm the principle of reason which it re-discovers in the world of material phenomena. Hence Huxley was more religious than he knew. It is not the agnostic who is the non-religious man, but the naïve realist who sees every fact and situation uncolored by fancy or theory or illusion. For such a mind, spiritual values do not exist. This kind of materialism is a different thing from philosophical materialism, which is very theoretical and fanciful. There are persons who approach this naïve realism, but I doubt if anyone is wholly lacking in poetry and fancy. Certainly Huxley was not.

Ordinarily we see our environment in a perspective of wish-fancy and traditional myth and magic. To more logical minds the world of objects is colored by the “sentiment of Rationality.” The universe appears to them to be governed, not by an indulgent or harsh imaginary Father, but by a principle of Reason. In each case, the fiction of security gives the feeling of salvation. In a wholly rational universe salvation is explanation. Everything is reasonable, hence right, if only we could explain it and show its place in the whole. Nineteenth century science could conceive of the world order as a mechanism and believe that it had passed from faith to knowledge in its agnosticism of the things of the spirit, but as Whitehead says, “the faith in the possibility of science generated antecedently to the development of modern scientific theory is an unconscious derivative from medieval theology.”

The conflict in the nineteenth century on behalf of science has effected education in various ways. It has not emptied the churches, but it has had a marked liberalizing influence, causing various groups of believers to seek to modify the public expressions of their faith in the light of modern knowledge. It has given the average educated person of today a very different conception of his world from that commonly held a century ago. It has to some extent revived the Socratic insistence upon clear and accurate thinking as the first requirement of an educated mind. It has brought a greater degree of objectivity and wholesomeness of outlook to bear upon the formation of the mental habits of students. It is by its insistence upon the biological point of view, causing marked changes in men’s ideas of human nature and society, gradually turning their thought away from the political dogma of the eighteenth century to a less doctrinaire social philosophy.

On the other side, it may be said to be in part responsible for the over-specialization common in our educational institutions. It has left on the mind of the public the impression that science is a new kind of magic, sometimes actually augmenting the general credulity and gullibility. Almost any sort of nonsense may now find space in the columns of the Sunday papers and pass current with the assertion that it is “scientific.” Minds stuffed with a smattering of science may be just as opinionated as minds stuffed with a smattering of theology.

A result which could perhaps not have been foreseen in 1875--and which I believe twentieth century science is destined to remedy--grew out of the one-sidedness of the Humanism of Huxley and others of his day which I have discussed. The scientific interest tended to have a mechanizing influence upon all life and culture, to ignore and sometimes deny all values which resisted laboratory methods. And having reduced all possible phenomena of life to a statement of the movements of particles of matter which were said to underlie and cause all else, this purposeless correlation of matter, space and movement expressed in mathematical formulae was frequently given out as the true picture of the nature of all existence--human life included.

Biologists and psychologists often have resorted to rather amusing gestures and have deliberately ignored possible lines of inquiry in order to imitate as closely as possible the physicists and the astronomers. Just as matter was thought to consist of combinations of atoms, so living organisms consisted of cells, and complex acts of behavior were seen to consist of combinations of simple reflexes. The cell and the reflex, being the irreducible minimum of physiology and of psychology, were said to be the realities which constituted the nature of the organism and its acts. All phenomena of life were but combinations of these elemental realities. Find the smallest particles in the combination, show how by a mechanical principle they are inevitably placed in certain temporal and spacial and other quantitative relationships, and behold, science has led you to _Reality_. All this seemed to be very certain in the nineteenth century; it alone was _knowledge_, all else was mere opinion and error.

Professor Whitehead says, “But the progress of biology and psychology has probably been checked by the uncritical assumption of half-truths. If science is not to degenerate into a medley of _ad hoc_ hypotheses, it must become philosophical and must enter upon a thorough criticism of its own foundations....

“There persists, however, throughout the whole period the fixed scientific cosmology which presupposes the ultimate fact of an irreducible brute matter, or material, spread throughout space in a flux of configurations. In itself such a material is senseless, valueless, purposeless. It just does what it does do, following a fixed routine imposed by external relations which do not spring from the nature of its being. It is this assumption that I call ‘scientific materialism.’”

“The progress of science has now reached a turning point. The stable foundations of physics have broken up: also for the first time physiology is asserting itself as an effective body of knowledge, as distinct from a scrap-heap. The old foundations of scientific thought are becoming unintelligible. Time, space, matter, material, ether, electricity, mechanism, organism, configuration, structure, pattern, function, all require reinterpretation. What is the sense of talking about a mechanical explanation when you do not know what you mean by mechanics?”

It is this disposition to find the real nature of the facts in the smallest homogeneous particles, in other words, “atomism,” which science in the twentieth century modifies. The parts themselves, considered without regard to their position in the whole event, are nothing. The reality is the organism, the situation as a whole. The unity of a tree is very different from that of a machine, and even physicists are beginning to suspect that they also deal with the former kind of unity. The effect of this change of view upon education is difficult to predict. I believe there are indications of a better synthesis of science with general culture than that which obtained in Huxley’s time. And as science modifies its mechanistic presuppositions, there will doubtless be an increase of the importance of philosophy in education, less pretense at finality, greater intellectual modesty and more general appreciation of human worth than is possible when educational philosophy is under the sway of a scientific dogma which dehumanizes the individual, reduces him to atoms, and regards him as a machine.

The recognition of the probability that much even of our established scientific knowledge is a human convention, should have a liberalizing effect upon the education of the present generation. Compare the assurance of Huxley with the following passages which I quote from the writings of Bertrand Russell, the first from his book on “Relativity,” and the second from the closing words of “The ABC of Atoms.”

“What we know about the physical world, I repeat, is much more abstract than was formerly supposed. Between bodies there are occurrences, such as light waves; of the _laws_ of these occurrences, we know something--just as much as can be expressed in mathematical formulae--but of their _nature_ we know nothing. Of the bodies themselves, as we saw in the preceding chapter, we know so little that we cannot even be sure that they are anything: they _may_ be merely groups of events in other places, those events which we should naturally regard as their effects.... Perhaps an illustration may make the matter clear. Between a piece of orchestral music as played, and the same piece of music as printed in the score, there is a certain resemblance, which may be described as a resemblance in structure. The resemblance is of such a sort that, when you know the rules, you can infer the music from the score or the score from the music. But suppose you had been stone deaf from birth, but had lived among musical people. You could understand, if you had learned to speak and to do lip-reading, that the musical scores represented something quite different from themselves in intrinsic quality, though similar in structure. The value of music would be completely unimaginable to you, but you could infer all its mathematical characteristics, since they are the same as those of the score. Now our knowledge of nature is something like this. We can read the scores, and infer just so much as our stone-deaf person could have inferred about music. But we have not the advantages which he derived from association with musical people. We cannot know whether the music represented by the scores is beautiful or hideous; perhaps, in the last analysis, we cannot be quite sure that the scores represent anything but themselves.”

“The theory of relativity has shown that most of traditional dynamics, which was supposed to contain scientific laws, really consisted of conventions as to measurement, and was strictly analogous to the ‘great law’ that there are always three feet to a yard. In particular, this applies to the conservation of energy. This makes it plausible to suppose that every apparent law of nature which strikes us as reasonable is not really a law of nature, but a concealed convention, plastered on to nature by our love of what we, in our arrogance, choose to consider rational. Eddington hints that a real law of nature is likely to stand out by the fact that it appears to us irrational, since in that case it is less likely that we have invented it to satisfy our intellectual taste. And from this point of view he inclines to the belief that the quantum-principle is the first real law of nature that has been discovered in physics.

“This raises a somewhat important question: Is the world ‘rational,’ i. e., such as to conform to our intellectual habits? Or is it ‘irrational,’ i. e., not such as we should have made it if we had been in the position of the Creator? I do not propose to suggest an answer to this question.”

No, we do not know whether the world is such as we would have made it if we had been in the position of the Creator. But it is possible for us to gain some intelligent idea of what we can and should make of our world so far as lies within our human power and understanding. Throughout all historic times men have striven to attain that insight, discrimination and foreknowledge which would enable them to become “legislators of values”--to give their existence quality and their experiences an order of preference that would lend beauty and harmony and some permanence to the half-chaotic stream of events and objects which swept through their lives. This is the aim of the pursuit of knowledge. It is to give to existence an “order of rank.” What if the order be a human one? General coöperation in its development is what we mean by culture. And education is not mere perpetuation of the order of the past. The hierarchy of values must be constantly recreated if it is to survive. Knowledge of the past is the inspiration to such creative effort and knowledge of nature is a guide to it. A generation ago William James, whose philosophy of science was thoroughly Humanistic, suggested that the fascination of the pursuit of knowledge was that we might thus be in at the places where truth is actually in the making, and that we should never know what sort of world this would be “till the last man’s vote is in and counted.” What we are to make of this unfinished world depends largely upon the power and wisdom and appreciation of value which we may attain through our education.