Huxley's Paradox.
“The whole analogy of natural operations furnish so complete and crushing an argument against the intervention of any but what are called secondary causes, in the production of all the phenomena of the universe, that, in view of the intimate relations of man and the rest of the living world, and between the forces exerted by the latter and all other forces, I can see no reason for doubting that all are co-ordinate terms of nature's great progression, from formless to formed, from the inorganic to the organic, from blind force to conscious intellect and will.” Huxley's Evidence of Man's Place in Nature, London, 1864, p. 107.
A writer in the Spectator charged Professor Huxley with Atheism. The professor replies, in the number of that paper for February 10, 1866, thus: “I do not know that I care very much about popular odium, so there is no great merit in saying that if I really saw fit to deny the existence of a God I should certainly do so for the sake of my own intellectual freedom, and be the honest Atheist you are pleased to say I am. As it happens, however, I can not take this position with honesty, inasmuch as it is, and always has been, a favorite tenet that Atheism is as absurd, logically speaking, as Polytheism.” In the same sheet, he says: “The denying the possibility of miracles seems to me quite as unjustifiable as Atheism.” Is Huxley in conflict with Huxley?