“As I have already said, I imagine that most of those of my contemporaries who thought seriously about the matter were very much in my own state of mind—inclined to say to both Mosaists and Evolutionists ‘A plague on both your houses!’ and disposed to turn aside from an interminable and apparently fruitless discussion to labour in the fertile fields of ascertainable fact. And I may therefore further suppose that the publication of the Darwin and Wallace papers in 1858, and still more that of the Origin in 1859, had the effect upon them of the flash of light, which to a man who has lost himself in a dark night suddenly reveals a road which, whether it takes him straight home or not, certainly goes his way. That which we were looking for and could not find was a hypothesis respecting the origin of known organic forms which assumed the operation of no causes but such as could be proved to be actually at work. We wanted, not to pin our faith to that or any other speculation, but to get hold of clear and definite conceptions which could be brought face to face with facts, and have their validity tested. The Origin provided us with the working hypothesis we sought. Moreover, it did the immense service of freeing us for ever from the dilemma—refuse to accept the creation hypothesis, and what have you to propose that can be accepted by any cautious reasoner? In 1857 I had no answer ready, and I do not think that any one else had. A year later we reproached ourselves with dulness for being perplexed by such an inquiry. My reflection, when I first made myself master of the central idea of the Origin was ‘How extremely stupid not to have thought of that!’ I suppose that Columbus’s companions said much the same when he made the egg stand on end. The facts of variability, of the struggle for existence, of adaptation to conditions, were notorious enough, but none of us had suspected that the road to the heart of the species problem lay through them, until Darwin and Wallace dispelled the darkness, and the beacon-fire of the Origin guided the benighted.”
But the disciple soon outstripped the master. As was said of Luther in relation to Erasmus, Huxley hatched the egg that Darwin laid. For in the Origin of Species the theory was not pushed to its obvious conclusion: Darwin only hinted that it “would throw much light on the origin of man and his history.” His silence, as he candidly tells us in the Introduction to the Descent of Man, was due to a desire “not to add to the prejudices against his views.” No such hesitancy kept Huxley silent. In the spirit of Plato’s Laws, he followed the argument whithersoever it led. In 1860 he delivered a course of lectures to working-men On the Relations of Man to the Lower Animals, and in 1862, a couple of lectures on the same subject at the Edinburgh Philosophical Institution. The important and significant feature of these discourses was the demonstration that no cerebral barrier divides man from apes; that the attempt to draw a psychical distinction between him and the lower animals is futile; and that “even the highest faculties of feeling and of intellect begin to germinate in lower forms of life.” The lectures were published in 1863 in a volume entitled Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature; and it was with pride warranted by the results of subsequent researches that Huxley, in a letter to the writer, thus refers to the book when arranging for its reissue among the Collected Essays—
I was looking through Man’s Place in Nature the other day. I do not think there is a word I need delete, nor anything I need add, except in confirmation and extension of the doctrine there laid down. That is great good fortune for a book thirty years old, and one that a very shrewd friend of mine implored me not to publish, as it would certainly ruin all my prospects.
The sparse annotations to the whole series of reprinted matter show that the like permanence attends all his writings. And yet, true workman, with ideal ever lying ahead, as he was, he remarked to the writer that never did a book come hot from the press, but he wished that he could suppress it and rewrite it.
But before dealing with the momentous issues raised in Man’s Place in Nature, we must return to 1860. For that was the “Sturm und Drang” period. Then, at Oxford, “home of lost causes,” as Matthew Arnold apostrophizes her in the Preface to his Essays in Criticism, was fought, on Saturday, 30th of June, a memorable duel between biologist and bishop; perhaps in its issues, more memorable than the historic discussion on the traditional doctrine of special creation between Cuvier and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire in the French Academy in 1830.
Both Huxley and Wilberforce were doughty champions. The scene of combat, the Museum Library, was crammed to suffocation. Fainting women were carried out. There had been “words” between Owen and Huxley on the previous Thursday. Owen contended that there were certain fundamental differences between the brains of man and apes. Huxley met this with “direct and unqualified contradiction,” and pledged himself to “justify that unusual procedure elsewhere.” No wonder that the atmosphere was electric. The bishop was up to time. Declamation usurped the vacant place of argument in his speech, and the declamation became acrid. He finished his harangue by asking Huxley whether he was related by his grandfather’s or grandmother’s side to an ape. “The Lord hath delivered him into my hands,” whispered Huxley to a friend at his side, as he rose to reply. After setting his opponent an example in demonstrating his case by evidence which, although refuting Owen, evoked no admission of error from him then or ever after, Huxley referred to the personal remark of Wilberforce. And this is what he said—
I asserted, and I repeat, that a man has no reason to be ashamed of having an ape for his grandfather. If there were an ancestor whom I should feel shame in recalling, it would be a man, a man of restless and versatile intellect, who, not content with an equivocal success in his own sphere of activity, plunges into scientific questions with which he has no real acquaintance, only to obscure them by an aimless rhetoric, and distract the attention of his hearers from the real point at issue by eloquent digressions, and skilled appeals to religious prejudice.
Perhaps the best comment on a piece of what is now ancient history is to quote the admissions made by Lord Salisbury—a rigid High Churchman—in his presidential address to the British Association in this same city of Oxford in 1894—
Few now are found to doubt that animals separated by differences far exceeding those that distinguish what we know as species have yet descended from common ancestors.... Darwin has, as a matter of fact, disposed of the doctrine of the immutability of species.
Few, also, are now found to doubt not only that doctrine, but also the doctrine that all life-forms have a common origin; plants and animals being alike built-up of matter which is identical in character. This doctrine, to-day a commonplace of biology, was, thirty years ago, rank heresy, since it seemed to reduce the soul of man to the level of his biliary duct. Hence the Oxford storm was but a capful of wind compared with that which raged round Huxley’s lecture on The Physical Basis of Life delivered, thus aggravating the offence, on a “Sabbath” evening in Edinburgh in 1868. People had settled down, with more or less vague understanding of the matter, into quiescent acceptance of Darwinism. And now their somnolence was rudely shaken by this Southron troubler of Israel, with his production of a bottle of solution of smelling salts, and a pinch or two of other ingredients, which represented the elementary substances entering into the composition of every living thing from a jelly-speck to man. Well might the removal of the stopper to that bottle take their breath away! Microscopists, philosophers “so-called,” and clerics alike raised the cry of “gross materialism,” never pausing to read Huxley’s anticipatory answer to the baseless charge, an answer repeated again and again in his writings, as in the essay of Descartes’ Discourse touching the method of using one’s reason rightly, and in his Hume. In season and out of season he never wearies in insisting that there is nothing in the doctrine inconsistent with the purest idealism. “All the phenomena of Nature are, in their ultimate analysis, known to us only as facts of consciousness.” The cyclone thus raised travelled westward on the heels of Tyndall, when in 1874 he asserted the fundamental identity of the organic and inorganic; dashing, as his Celtic blood stirred him, the statements with a touch of poetry in the famous phrase that “the genius of Newton was potential in the fires of the sun.”