Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work

by Sir P. Chalmers Mitchell

The great evil of authority was its tendency to erect itself into some form of infallibility of universal application. When, for a time, the geological victory was won, and the supporters of authority had comforted themselves with reconciliations, there arose the much greater and more serious opposition between authority and the conceptions involved in evolution. Huxley, as we have seen in an earlier chapter, found that all the old weapons of authority were resumed with a renewed assurance, and his advocacy of the duty of doubt became not merely the defence of a great principle but a means of self-defence. The conception of infallible authority had been transferred by Protestants from the Church to the Bible, and against this Huxley strove with all his might. It is convenient to reserve a full treatment of Huxley's attitude to the Bible for a separate chapter, but at this point a quotation will shew his general view.

SIR CHARLES LYELL

"The truth is that the pretension to infallibility, by whomsoever made, has done endless mischief; with impartial malignity it has proved a curse, alike to those who have made it and those who have accepted it; and its most baneful shape is book infallibility. For sacerdotal corporations and schools of philosophy are able, under due compulsion of opinion, to retreat from positions that have become untenable; while the dead hand of a book sets and stiffens, amidst texts and formulæ, until it becomes a mere petrifaction, fit only for that function of stumbling-block, which it so admirably performs. Wherever bibliolatry has prevailed, bigotry and cruelty have accompanied it. It lies at the root of the deep-seated, sometimes disguised, but never absent, antagonism of all varieties of ecclesiasticism to the freedom of thought and to the spirit of scientific investigation."

Moreover, Presbyter is but Priest writ large, and the Protestant clergy were the leaders in denunciation of every person and every branch of investigation or of thought in any way connected with evolution. Huxley was no respecter of persons, and, following the example of Darwin, he was ready to study carefully any arguments for or against any scientific doctrines by whomsoever or howsoever brought forward. The right of criticism and duty of doubt, which he insisted on for himself, he was extremely willing to extend to others, and, as a matter of fact he was on terms of intimate friendship with some of his most distinguished clerical opponents. But to an extent which it is almost impossible now to realise, the clergy generally abused their legitimate position and authority, and demanded or assumed a right to give authoritative opinions on questions which did not come within their domain. It was the old attempt of the Church to make its authority felt in all departments of thought and of action, and the attempt was made in the traditional fashion. Questions of fact were associated with questions of morality, and those who held one view as to the meaning and implication of certain facts were denounced as wicked. Huxley at once carried the war into the enemy's own country:

"And, seeing how large a share of this clamour is raised by the clergy of one denomination or another, may I say, in conclusion, that it really would be well if ecclesiastical persons would reflect that ordination, whatever deep-seated graces it may confer, has never been observed to be followed by any visible increase in the learning or the logic of its subject. Making a man a Bishop, or entrusting him with the office of ministering to even the largest of Presbyterian congregations, or setting him up to lecture to a church congress, really does not in the smallest degree augment such title to respect as his opinions may intrinsically possess. And when such a man presumes on an authority, which was conferred on him for other purposes, to sit in judgment on matters his incompetence to deal with which is patent, it is permissible to ignore his sacerdotal pretensions, and to tell him, as one would tell a mere, common, unconsecrated layman: that it is not necessary for any man to occupy himself with problems of this kind unless he so choose; life is filled full enough with the performance of its ordinary and obvious duties. But that, if a man elect to become a judge of these grave questions; still more if he assume the responsibility of attaching praise or blame to his fellow-men for the conclusions at which they arrive touching them, he will commit a sin more grievous than most breaches of the decalogue, unless he avoid a lazy reliance upon the information that is gathered by prejudice and filtered through passion, unless he go back to the prime sources of knowledge—the facts of Nature, and the thoughts of those wise men who for generations past have been her best interpreters."

In the campaign for absolute freedom of thought, for the duty of not believing anything except on sufficient evidence, Huxley was frequently met by an argument of superficial strength, and which no doubt was in the minds of many of his clerical opponents. In the minds of a majority of people, it was said, and particularly of slightly educated people, the reasons for right conduct and the distinctions between right and wrong are firmly associated with the Bible and with religion. If you allow doubts as to the absolute veracity of the Bible, or as to the supernatural origin of religion to reach such persons, you run a grave risk that they will reflect the uncertainty on the canons of morality. In taking from them what you believe to be false, inevitably you will unsettle their ideas on moral questions although you might be in full agreement as to these moral questions. Huxley refused to accept the asserted association between morality and particular metaphysical or religious doctrines.

"Many ingenious persons now appear to consider that the incompatibility of pantheism, of materialism, and of any doubt about the immortality of the soul, with religion and morality is to be held as an axiomatic truth. I confess that I have a certain difficulty in accepting this dogma. For the Stoics were notoriously materialists and pantheists of the most extreme character; and while no strict Stoic believed in the eternal duration of the individual soul, some even denied its persistence after death. Yet it is equally certain, that, of all gentile philosophies, Stoicism exhibits the highest ethical development, is animated by the most religious spirit, and has exerted the profoundest influence upon the moral and religious development not merely of the best men among the Romans, but among the moderns down to our own day."

He held the view now generally taken by students of the history of man, that standards of conduct and religious beliefs arose in separate ways and developed independently, and that it was only comparatively recently that "religion took morality under its protection." But he met the argument in a still more direct fashion by rejecting entirely the possibility or advisability of founding any system of ethics upon a false basis.