Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work

by Sir P. Chalmers Mitchell

[CHAPTER XVI]

ETHICS OF THE COSMOS

Conduct and Metaphysics—Conventional and Critical Minds—Good and Evil—Huxley's Last Appearance at Oxford—The Ethical Process and the Cosmic Process—Man's Intervention—The Cosmic Process Evil—Ancient Reconciliations—Modern Acceptance of the Difficulties—Criticism of Huxley's Pessimism—Man and his Ethical Aspirations Part of the Cosmos.

We have seen that Huxley refused to acquiesce in the current orthodox doctrine that our systems of morality rested on a special revelation, miraculous in its origin, and vouched for by the recorded miracles of its Founder, or by those entrusted by the Founder with miraculous power. He supported the view that, historically and actually, there is no necessary connection between religion and morality. The one is an attempt, in his opinion always unsuccessful, to lift the veil from the unseen, to know the unknowable; the other is simply the code that social man, through the ages, has elaborated for his own guidance, and proved by his own experience. So far as the conduct of life goes, the morality of one who accepts the agnostic position with regard to revelation and the unseen universe differs in no respect from the code taken under the protection of the modern forms of religion. As John Morley, in his Essay on Voltaire wrote of such a person:

"There are new solutions for him, if the old have fallen dumb. If he no longer believe death to be a stroke from the sword of God's justice, but the leaden footfall of an inflexible law of matter, the humility of his awe is deepened, and the tenderness of his pity made holier, that creatures who can love so much should have their days so shut round with a wall of darkness. The purifying anguish of remorse will be stronger, not weaker, when he has trained himself to look upon every wrong in thought, every duty omitted from act, each infringement of the inner spiritual law which humanity is constantly perfecting for its own guidance and advantage, less as a breach of the decrees of an unseen tribunal than as an ungrateful infection weakening and corrupting the future of his brothers."

But there are wider questions than the immediate problems of conduct. A certain type of mind finds it almost impossible not to attempt ethical judgments on the whole universe, not to speculate whether the Cosmos, as we can imagine it from the part of it within the cognisance of man, offers a spectacle of moral or immoral or of non-moral significance. In the old times of Greece and in the modern world many have been devoid of the taste for argument on such subjects. Those who are uninterested in these abstract discussions are rarely in opposition to the mode of faith surrounding them, as to reject the doctrines held by the majority of one's friends and associates implies either a disagreeable disposition or an unusual interest in ultimate problems; they are usually orthodox according to their environment—Stoics, Epicureans, Jews, Episcopalians, Catholics, Quakers, Methodists, Mormons, Mohammedans, Buddhists, or whatever may be the prevailing dogma around them. The attitude of indifference to moral philosophy has practically no relation to what may be considered good or bad moral conduct; those characterised by it live above or below or round about their own moral standards in a fashion as variable as that of moral philosophers. Many of the saints, ancient and modern, have been notorious instances; question them as to their faith or as to the logical foundation of their renunciations and they will tell you in simple honesty or make it plain by their answers that they have no head for logic, that they cannot argue, but only know and feel their position to be true. In addition to the saints, many of the best and most of the pleasant people in the world are of this type.

The type strongly in contrast with the foregoing is found in persons of a more strenuous, perhaps more admirable but less agreeable character. The savour of acerbity may be a natural attribute of the critical character, and it is certainly not lessened where moral philosophy is the subject-matter of the criticism. The continual search after solutions of problems that may be insoluble at least makes the seekers excellent judges of wrong solutions. Like Luther and Loyola and Kant, they may be able to satisfy themselves, or, like Huxley, they may remain in doubt, but in either case they are excellent critics of the solutions of others. They are the firebrands of faith or of negation; they are possessed by an intellectual fury that will not let them cease from propagandising. They must go through the world as missionaries; and the missionary spirit is dual, one side zealous to proclaim the new, the other equally zealous to denounce the old. But theirs is the great work, "to burn old falsehood bare," to tear away the incrustations of time which people have come to accept as the thing itself, and in their track new and lively truth springs up, as fresh green follows the devastations of fire.

To most of us it seems of sufficient importance and of sufficient difficulty to make our decisions in the little eddies of good and evil that form as the world-stream breaks round our individual lives. Huxley strove to interpret the world-stream itself, to translate its movements into the ethical language of man. As knowledge of the forces and movements of the Cosmos has increased so has our general conception been intensified, our conception of it as a wondrous display of power and grandeur and superhuman fixity of order. But are the forces of the Cosmos good or evil? Are we, and the Cosmos of which we are a part, the sport of changeable and capricious deities, the pawns in a game of the gods, as some of the Greeks held; or of a power drunkenly malicious, as Heine once cynically suggested; or a battle-ground for a force of good and a force of evil as in so many Eastern religions? Are we dominated by pure evil, as some dark creeds have held, or by pure good, as the religion of the Western world teaches? And if we are dominated by pure evil, whence come good and the idea of good, or, if by pure good, whence evil and the idea of evil?

Huxley's interest in these great problems appears and reappears throughout his published writings, but his views are most clearly and systematically exposed in his "Romanes" lecture on "Evolution and Ethics" delivered and published at Oxford in 1894, and afterwards republished with a prefatory essay in the last volume of his Collected Essays. Not long before his death, Professor Romanes, who had come to live in Oxford, founded a University lectureship, the purpose of which was that once a year a distinguished man should address the University on a subject neither religious nor political. Mr. Gladstone was the first lecturer, and, at the suggestion of the founder, Huxley was chosen as the second. For years he had been taking a special interest in both religion and politics, and he was not a little embarrassed by the restrictions imposed by the terms of the foundation, for he determined to make ethical science the subject of his address, and

"ethical science is, on all sides, so entangled with religion and politics, that the lecturer who essays to touch the former without coming in contact with either of the latter, needs all the dexterity of an egg-dancer, and may even discover that his sense of clearness and his sense of propriety come into conflict, by no means to the advantage of the former."