Until the past half-century, man excepted himself, save in crude and superficial fashion, from that investigation which, for long periods, he has made into the earth beneath him and the heavens above him. This tardy inquiry into the history of his own kind, and its place in the order and succession of life, as well as its relation to the lower animals, between whom and itself, as has been shown, the barbaric mind sees much in common, is due, so far as Christendom is concerned (and the like cause applies, mutatis mutandis, in non-Christian civilized communities), to the subjection of the intellect to pre-conceived theories based on the authority accorded to ancient legends about man. These legends, invested with the sanctity with which time endows the past, finally became integral parts of sacred literatures, to question which was as superfluous as it was impious. Thus it has come to pass that the only being competent to inquire into his own antecedents has looked at his history through the distorting prism of a mythopœic past!
Perhaps, in the long run, the gain has exceeded the loss. For, in the precedence of study of other sciences more remote from man’s “business and bosom,” there has been rendered possible a more dispassionate treatment of matters charged with profounder issues. Since the Church, however she may conveniently ignore the fact as concession after concession is wrung from her, has never slackened in jealousy of the advance of secular knowledge, it was well for human progress that those subjects of inquiry which affected orthodox views only indirectly were first prosecuted. The brilliant discoveries in astronomy, to which the Copernican theory gave impetus, although they displaced the earth from its assumed supremacy among the bodies in space, did not apparently affect the doctrine of the supremacy of man as the centre of Divine intervention, as the creature for whom the great scheme of redemption had been formulated “in the counsels of the Trinity,” and the tragedy of the self-sacrifice of God the Son enacted on earth. The surrender or negation of any fundamental dogma of Christian theology was not involved in the abandonment of the statement in the Bible as to the dominant position of the earth in relation to the sun and other self-luminous stars. To our own time the increase of knowledge concerning the myriads of sidereal systems which revolve through space is not held to be destructive of those dogmas, but held, rather, to supply material for speculation as to the probable extension of Divine paternal government throughout the universe. And, although, as coming nearer home, with consequent greater chance of intrusion of elements of friction, the like applies to the discoveries of geology. Apart from intellectual apathy, which explains much, the impact of these discoveries on traditional beliefs was softened by the buffers which a moderating spirit of criticism interposed in the shape of superficial “reconciliations” emptying the old cosmogony of all its poetry, and therefore of its value as a key to primitive ideas, and converting it into bastard science. Thus a temporary, because artificial, unity, was set up. But with the evidence supplied by study of the ancient life whose remains are imbedded in the fossil-yielding strata, that unity is shivered. In a Scripture that “cannot be broken” there was read the story of conflict and death æons before man appeared. Between this record, and that which spoke of pain and death as the consequences of man’s disobedience to the frivolous prohibition of an anthropomorphic God, there is no possible reconciliation.
To the evidence from fossiliferous beds was added evidence from old river-gravels and limestone caverns. The relics extracted from the stalagmitic deposits in Kent’s Hole, near Torquay, had lain unheeded for some years save as “curios,” when M. Boucher des Perthes saw in the worked flints of a somewhat rougher type which he found mingled with the bones of rhinoceroses, cave-bears, mammoths, or woolly-haired elephants, and other mammals in the “drift” or gravel-pits of Abbeville, in Picardy, the proofs of man’s primitive savagery, so far as Western Europe was concerned. The presence of these rudely-chipped flints had been noticed by M. de Perthes in 1839, but he could not persuade savants to admit that human hands had shaped them, until these doubting Thomases saw for themselves like implements in situ at a depth of seventeen feet from the original surface of the ground. That was in 1858: a year before the publication of the Origin of Species. Similar materials have been unearthed from every part of the globe habitable once or inhabited now. They confirm the speculations of Lucretius as to a universal makeshift with stone, bone, horn, and such-like accessible or pliable substances during the ages that preceded the discovery of metals. Therefore, the existence of a Stone Age at one period or another where now an Age of Iron (following an Age of Bronze) prevails, is an established canon of archæological science. From this follows the inference that man’s primitive condition was that which corresponds to the lowest type extant, the Australian and Papuan; that the further back inquiry is pushed such culture as exists is found to have been preceded by barbarism; and that the savage races of to-day represent not a degradation to which man, as the result of a fall from primeval purity and Eden-like ease, has sunk, but a condition out of which all races above the savage have emerged.
While Prehistoric Archæology, with its enormous mass of material remains gathered from “dens and caves of the earth,” from primitive work-shops, from rude tombs and temples, thus adds its testimony to the “great cloud of witnesses”; immaterial remains, potent as embodying the thought of man, are brought by the twin sciences of Comparative Mythology and Folklore, and Comparative Theology—remains of paramount value, because existing to this day in hitherto unsuspected form, as survivals in beliefs and rites and customs. Readers of Tylor’s Primitive Culture, with its wealth of facts and their significance; and of Lyall’s Asiatic Studies, wherein is described the making of myths to this day in the heart of India; need not be told how the slow zigzag advance of man in material things has its parallel in the stages of his intellectual and spiritual advance all the world over; from the lower animism to the higher conception of deity; from bewildering guesses to assuring certainties. To this mode of progress no civilized people has been the exception, as notably in the case of the Hebrews, was once thought—“the correspondence between the old Israelitic and other archaic forms of theology extending to details.”
While, therefore, the discoveries of astronomers and geologists have been disintegrating agencies upon old beliefs, the discoveries classed under the general term Anthropological are acting as more powerful solvents on every opinion of the past. Showing on what mythical foundation the story of the fall of man rests, Anthropology has utterly demolished the raison d’être of the doctrine of his redemption—the keystone of the fabric. It has penetrated the mists of antiquity, and traced the myth of a forfeited Paradise, of the Creation, the Deluge, and other legends, to their birthplaces in the valley of the Euphrates or the uplands of Persia; legends whose earliest inscribed records are on Accadian tablets, or in the scriptures of Zarathustra. It has in the spirit of the commended Bereans, “searched” those and other scriptures, finding therein legends of founders of ancient faiths cognate to those which in the course of the centuries gathered round Jesus of Nazareth; it has collated the rites and ceremonies of many a barbaric theology with those of old-world religions—Brahmanic, Buddhistic, Christian—and found only such differences between them as are referable to the higher or the lower culture. For the history of superstitions is included in the history of beliefs; the superstitions being the germ-plasm of which all beliefs above the lowest are the modified products. Belief incarnates itself in word or act. In the one we have the charm, the invocation, and the dogma; in the other the ritual and ceremony. “A ritual system,” Professor Robertson Smith remarks, “must always remain materialistic, even if its materialism is disguised under the cloak of mysticism.” And it is with the incarnated ideas, uninfluenced by the particular creed in connection with which it finds them, that anthropology deals. Its method is that of biology. Without bias, without assumptions of relative truth or falsity, the anthropologist searches into origins, traces variations, compares and classifies, and relates the several families to one ordinal group. He must be what was said of Dante, “a theologian to whom no dogma is foreign.” Unfortunately, this method, whose application to the physical sciences is unchallenged, is, when applied to beliefs, regarded as one of attack, instead of being one of explanation. But this should not deter; and if in analyzing a belief we kill a superstition, this does but show what mortality lay at its core. For error cannot survive dissection. Moreover, as John Morley puts it, “to tamper with veracity is to tamper with the vital force of human progress.” Therefore, delivering impartial judgment, the verdict of anthropology upon the whole matter is that the claims of Christian theologians to a special and divine origin of their religion are refuted by the accordant evidence of the latest utterances of a science whose main concern is with the origin, nature, and destiny of man.
The extension of the comparative method to the various products of man’s intellectual and spiritual nature is the logical sequence to the adoption of that method throughout every department of the universe. Of course it starts with the assumption of differences in things, else it would be superfluous. But it equally starts with the assumption of resemblances, and in every case it has brought out the fact that the differences are superficial, and that the resemblances are fundamental.
All this bears closely on Huxley’s work. The impulse thereto has come largely from the evidence focussed in Man’s Place in Nature, evidence of which the material of the writings of his later years is the expansion. The cultivation of intellect and character had always been a favourite theme with him, and the interest was widened when the passing of Mr. Forster’s Elementary Education Act in 1870 brought the problem of popular culture to the front. The wave of enthusiasm carried a group of distinguished liberal candidates to the polls, and Huxley was elected a member of the School Board for London. Then, although in not so acute a form as now, the religious difficulty was the sole cause of any serious division, and Huxley’s attitude therein puzzled a good many people because he advocated the retention of the Bible in the schools. Those who should have known him better thought that he was (to quote from one of his letters to the writer) “a hypocrite, or simply a fool.” “But,” he adds, “my meaning was that the mass of the people should not be deprived of the one great literature which is open to them, nor shut out from the perception of its place in the whole past history of civilised mankind.” He lamented, as every thoughtful person must lament, the decay of Bible reading in this generation, while, at the same time, he advocated the more strenuously its detachment from the glosses and theological inferences which do irreparable injury to a literature whose value cannot be overrated.
For Huxley was well read in history, and therefore he would not trust the clergy as interpreters of the Bible. After repeating in the Prologue to his Essays on Controverted Questions what he had said about the book in his article on the School Boards in Critiques and Addresses, he adds, “I laid stress on the necessity of placing such instruction in lay hands; in the hope and belief that it would thus gradually accommodate itself to the coming changes of opinion; that the theology and the legend would drop more and more out of sight, while the perennially interesting historical, literary, and ethical contents would come more and more into view.”
Subsequent events have justified neither the hope nor the belief. Had Huxley lived to see that all the sectaries, while quarrelling as to the particular dogmas which may be deduced from the Bible, agree in refusing to use it other than as an instrument for the teaching of dogma, he would probably have come to see that the only solution in the interests of the young, is its exclusion from the schools. Never has any collection of writings, whose miscellaneous, unequal, and often disconnected character is obscured by the common title “Bible” which covers them, had such need for deliverance from the so-called “believers” in it. Its value is only to be realized in the degree that theories of its inspiration are abandoned. Then only is it possible to treat it like any other literature of the kind; to discriminate between the coarse and barbaric features which evidence the humanness of its origin, and the loftier features of its later portions which also evidence how it falls into line with other witnesses of man’s gradual ethical and spiritual development.
Huxley’s breadth of view, his sympathy with every branch of culture, his advocacy of literary in unison with scientific training, fitted him supremely for the work of the School Board, but its demands were too severe on a man never physically strong, and he was forced to resign. However, he was thereby set free for other work, which could be only effectively done by exchanging the arena for the study. The earliest important outcome of that relief was the monograph on Hume, published in 1879, and the latest was the Romanes lecture on Evolution and Ethics, which was delivered in the Sheldonian Theatre at Oxford on the 18th of May, 1893. Between the two lie a valuable series of papers dealing with the Evolution of Theology and cognate subjects. In all these we have the application of the theory of Evolution to the explanation of the origin of beliefs and of the basis of morals. To quote the saying attributed to Leibnitz, both Spencer and Huxley, and all who follow them, care for “science only because it enables them to speak with authority in philosophy and religion.” In a letter to the writer, wherein Huxley refers to his retirement from official life, he says:—