Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 75.djvu/506

transmutation assumed, which had been made, was in any way adequate to explain the phenomena. Looking back at the state of knowledge at the time, I really do not see that any other conclusion was justifiable. . . . As for the "Vestiges," I confess the book simply irritated me by the prodigious ignorance and thoroughly unscientific habit of mind manifested by the writer. If it had any influence at all, it set me against evolution. . . . Thus, looking back into the past, it seems to me that my own position of critical expectancy was just and reasonable. . . . So I took refuge in that tätige Skepsis which Goethe has so well defined; and, reversing the apostolic precept to be all things to all men, I usually defended the tenability of received doctrines, when I had to do with the transmutationists; and stood up for the possibility of transmutation, among the orthodox.

In this matter Huxley is assuredly a witness whose testimony should not lightly be set aside; for to his attainments as a naturalist he ordinarily joined singular logical acumen and rare openness of mind. Yet I think it possible to show that the passage just quoted gives a thoroughly misleading view of the logical status of the argument for evolution, as it existed in the light of the science of the period; that the attitude which Huxley assumed from 1850 to 1858 was contrary to all sound ideas of scientific method; and that he does the reputations of both Spencer and Chambers serious injustice. I shall attempt to establish these conclusions mainly by showing that the arguments and facts chiefly relied upon by Huxley himself and other early champions of transformism were entirely familiar and well authenticated from fifteen to twenty years before 1859, and had virtually all been clearly noted and pertinently used in the published evolutionary reasonings of Chambers or of Spencer. The truth is—as the evidence to be adduced will make clear—that Huxley's strongly emotional and highly pugnacious nature was held back by certain wholly non-logical influences from accepting an hypothesis for which the evidence was practically as potent for over a decade before he accepted it as it was at the time of his conversion. These influences did not in Huxley's case, as they did in so many others, proceed from religious tradition or temperamental conservatism. But Huxley had unquestionably been strongly repelled by the "Vestiges." The book was written in a somewhat exuberant and rhetorical style; with all its religious heterodoxy, it was characterized by a certain pious and edifying tone, and was given to abrupt transitions from scientific reasoning to mystical sentiment; it contained numerous blunders in matters of biological and geological detail; and its author inclined to believe, on the basis of some rather absurd experimental evidence, in the possibility of spontaneous generation. All these things were offensive to the professional standards of an enthusiastic young naturalist, scrupulous about the rigor of the game, intolerant of vagueness and of any mixture of the romantic imagination with scientific inquiry, a little the victim, perhaps, of the current scientific cant about "Baconian induction," and quite incapable of