taking, towards any doctrine or movement, any attitude intermediate between contemptuous hostility and ardent partizanship. Full advantage, moreover, had been taken, by the eminent scientists who were also champions of religious orthodoxy, of the faults of Chambers's book; they contrived very successfully to put about the impression that to be a "Vestigiarian" was to be "unscientific" and sentimental and absurd. These were three qualities which Huxley would have been peculiarly averse to being charged with. Finally, he seems to have been exasperated most of all by a single loose piece of phraseology that now and then recurs in the "Vestiges." Chambers, namely, was prone to speak of "laws" as if they were causes and, more particularly, as if they were secondary causes to which the "Divine Will" delegated its agency and control. To Huxley, from the beginning of his career, this hypostatizing fashion of referring to "laws of nature" was a bête noire; and in 1887 we still find him pursuing the author of the "Vestiges" with ridicule because of his "pseudo-scientific realism."[1] He, therefore,[2] in 1854, almost outdid the Edinburgh Review in the ferocity of his onslaught upon the layman who had ventured to put forward sweeping generalizations upon biological questions while
- ↑ "Science and Pseudo-science," 1887. Huxley's criticisms are curiously beside the mark. He argues that, whether you suppose that the Creator operates uniformly but directly "according to such rules as he thinks fit to lay down for himself," or that "he made the cosmical machine and then left it to itself," in either case his "personal responsibility is involved" in every result into which this uniform operation works out. But Chambers, so far from denying this, was especially anxious to insist upon it. What he equally insisted upon, however, was the uniformity of this agency. When he spoke of the Creator as working "through" law, the expression, doubtless, was infelicitous; but his essential idea was plain and unexceptionable, viz., that neither organic nor inorganic phenomena "result from capricious exertions of creative power; but that they have taken place in a definite order, the statement of which order is what men of science term a natural law." These last words are Huxley's own, uttered in 1862, in an address before the Geological Society. It is, he added, logically possible to regard such a law as "simply the statement of the manner in which a supernatural power has thought fit to act"; the main thing is that "the existence of the law and the possibility of its discovery by the human intellect" be recognized. This was exactly the essence of the view for which Chambers was contending. Huxley was so unduly enraged by a bit of unscientific looseness of language that he actually overlooked the important idea which that language was manifestly intended to express.
- ↑ I have not had access to this article, published in the Medical and Chirurgteal Review; but its character is sufficiently indicated in the correspondence of Huxley and Darwin. The former speaks of it as "the only review I ever have qualms of conscience about, on the ground of needless savagery." Darwin thought it "rather hard on the poor author"; and added a curiously mild intimation of his own belief: "I am perhaps no fair judge; for I am almost as unorthodox about species as the 'Vestiges' itself, though I hope not quite so unphilosophical" ("More Letters of Charles Darwin," I., 75).
