Half Hours With Modern Scientists: Lectures and Essays

by Thomas Henry Huxley; George F. Barker; E. D. Cope; James Hutchison Stirling; John Tyndall

Of the doctrines themselves which are alluded to here, I shall say nothing now; but of much else that is said, there is only to be expressed a hearty and even gratified approval. I demur, to be sure, to the exaltation of Hume over Kant—high as I place the former. Hume, with infinite fertility, surprised us, it may be said, perhaps, into attention on a great variety of points which had hitherto passed unquestioned; but, even on these points, his success was of an interrupted, scattered and inconclusive nature. He set the world adrift, but he set man too, reeling and miserable, adrift with it. Kant, again, with gravity and reverence, desired to refix, but in purity and truth, all those relations and institutions which alone give value to existence—which alone are humanity, in fact—but which Hume, with levity and mockery, had approached to shake. Kant built up again an entire new world for us of knowledge and duty, and, in a certain way, even belief; whereas Hume had sought to dispossess us of every support that man as man could hope to cling to. In a word, with at least equal fertility, Kant was, as compared with Hume, a graver, deeper, and, so to speak, a more consecutive, more comprehensive spirit. Graces there were indeed, or even, it may be said, subtleties, in which Hume had the advantage perhaps. He is still in England an unsurpassed master of expression—this, certainly, in his History, if in his Essays he somewhat baffles his own self by a certain labored breadth of conscious fine writing, often singularly inexact and infelicitous. Still Kant, with reference to his products, must be allowed much the greater importance. In the history of philosophy he will probably always command as influential a place in the modern world as Socrates in the ancient; while, as probably, Hume will occupy at best some such position as that of Heraclitus or Protagoras. Hume, nevertheless, if equal to Kant, must, in view at once of his own subjective ability and his enormous influence, be pronounced one of the most important of writers. It would be difficult to rate too high the value of his French predecessors and contemporaries as regards purification of their oppressed and corrupt country; and Hume must be allowed, though with less call, to have subserved some such function in the land we live in. In preferring Kant, indeed, I must be acquitted of an undue partiality; for all that appertains to personal bias was naturally, and by reason of early and numerous associations, on the side of my countryman.

Demurring, then, to Mr. Huxley’s opinion on this matter, and postponing remark on the doctrines to which he alludes, I must express a hearty concurrence with every word he utters on Comte. In him I too “find little or nothing of any scientific value.” I too have been lost in the mere mirage and sands of “those dreary and verbose pages;” and I acknowledge in Mr. Huxley’s every word the ring of a genuine experience. M. Comte was certainly a man of some mathematical and scientific proficiency, as well as of quick but biased intelligence. A member of the Aufklärung, he had seen the immense advance of physical science since Newton, under, as is usually said, the method of Bacon; and, like Hume, like Reid, like Kant, who had all anticipated him in this, he sought to transfer that method to the domain of mind. In this he failed; and though in a sociological aspect he is not without true glances into the present disintegration of society and the conditions of it, anything of importance cannot be claimed for him. There is not a sentence in his book that, in the hollow elaboration and windy pretentiousness of its build, is not an exact type of its own constructor. On the whole, indeed, when we consider the little to which he attained, the empty inflation of his claims, the monstrous and maniacal self-conceit into which he was exalted, it may appear, perhaps, that charity to M. Comte himself, to say nothing of the world, should induce us to wish that both his name and his works were buried in oblivion. Now, truly, that Mr. Huxley (the “call” being for the moment his) has so pronounced himself, especially as the facts of the case are exactly and absolutely what he indicates, perhaps we may expect this consummation not to be so very long delayed. More than those members of the revulsion already mentioned, one is apt to suspect, will be anxious now to beat a retreat. Not that this, however, is so certain to be allowed them; for their estimate of M. Comte is a valuable element in the estimate of themselves.

Frankness on the part of Mr. Huxley is not limited to his opinion of M. Comte; it accompanies us throughout his whole essay. He seems even to take pride, indeed, in naming always and everywhere his object at the plainest. That object, in a general point of view, relates, he tells us, solely to materialism, but with a double issue. While it is his declared purpose, in the first place, namely, to lead us into materialism, it is equally his declared purpose, in the second place, to lead us out of materialism. On the first issue, for example, he directly warns his audience that to accept the conclusions which he conceives himself to have established on Protoplasm, is to accept these also: That “all vital action” is but “the result of the molecular forces” of the physical basis; and that, by consequence, to use his own words to his audience, “the thoughts to which I am now giving utterance, and your thoughts regarding them, are but the expression of molecular changes in that matter of life which is the source of our other vital phenomena.” And, so far, I think, we shall not disagree with Mr. Huxley when he says that “most undoubtedly the terms of his propositions are distinctly materialistic.” Still, on the second issue, Mr. Huxley asserts that he is “individually no materialist.” “On the contrary, he believes materialism to involve grave philosophical error;” and the “union of materialistic terminology with the repudiation of materialistic philosophy” he conceives himself to share “with some of the most thoughtful men with whom he is acquainted.” In short, to unite both issues, we have it in Mr. Huxley’s own words, that it is the single object of his essay “to explain how such a union is not only consistent with, but necessitated by, sound logic;” and that, accordingly, he will, in the first place, “lead us through the territory of vital phenomena to the materialistic slough,” while pointing out, in the second, “the sole path by which, in his judgment, extrication is possible.” Mr. Huxley’s essay, then, falls evidently into two parts; and of these two parts we may say, further, that while the one—that in which he leads us into materialism—will be predominatingly physiological, the other—or that in which he leads us out of materialism—will be predominatingly philosophical. Two corresponding parts would thus seem to be prescribed to any full discussion of the essay; and of these, in the present needs of the world, it is evidently the latter that has the more promising theme. The truth is, however, that Mr. Huxley, after having exerted all his strength in his first part to throw us into “the materialistic slough,” by clear necessity of knowledge, only calls to us, in his second part, to come out of this slough again, on the somewhat obscure necessity of ignorance. This, then, is but a lop-sided balance, where a scale in the air only seems to struggle vainly to raise its well-weighted fellow on the ground. Mr. Huxley, in fact, possesses no remedy for materialism but what lies in the expression that, while he knows not what matter is in itself, he certainly knows that casualty is but contingent succession; and thus, like the so-called “philosophy” of the Revulsion, Mr. Huxley would only mock us into the intensest dogmatism on the one side by a fallacious reference to the intensest scepticism on the other.

The present paper, then, will regard mainly Mr. Huxley’s argument for materialism, but say what is required, at the same time, on his alleged argument—which is merely the imaginary, or imaginative, impregnation of ignorance—against it.

Following Mr. Huxley’s own steps in his essay, the course of his positions will be found to run, in summary, thus:—

What is meant by the physical basis of life is, that there is one kind of matter common to all living beings, and it is named protoplasm. No doubt it may appear at first sight that, in the various kinds of living beings, we have only difference before us, as in the lichen on the rock and the painter that paints it,—the microscopic animalcule or fungus and the Finner whale or Indian fig,—the flower in the hair of a girl and the blood in her veins, etc. Nevertheless, throughout these and all other diversities, there really exists a threefold unity—a unity of faculty, a unity of form, and a unity of substance.

On the first head, for example, or as regards faculty, power, the action exhibited, there are but three categories of human activity—contractility, alimentation, and reproduction; and there are no fewer for the lower forms of life, whether animal or vegetable. In the nettle, for instance, we find the woody case of its sting lined by a granulated, semi-fluid layer, that is possessed of contractility. But in this respect—that is, in the possession of contractile substance—other plants are as the nettle, and all animals are as plants. Protoplasm—for the nettle-layer alluded to is protoplasm—is common to the whole of them. The difference, in short between the powers of the lowest plant or animal and those of the highest is one only of degree and not of kind.

But, on the second head, it is not otherwise in form, or manifested external appearance and structure. Not the sting only, but the whole nettle, is made up of protoplasm; and of all the other vegetables the nettle is but a type. Nor are animals different. The colorless blood-corpuscles in man and the rest are identical with the protoplasm of the nettle; and both he and they consisted at first only of an aggregation of such. Protoplasm is the common constituent—the common origin. At last, as at first, all that lives, and every part of all that lives, are but nucleated or unnucleated, modified or unmodified, protoplasm.

But, on the third head, or with reference to unity of substance, to internal composition, chemistry establishes this also. All forms of protoplasm, that is, consist alike of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, and behave similarly under similar reagents.

So, now, a uniform character having in this threefold manner been proved for protoplasm, what is its origin, and what its fate? Of these the latter is not far to seek. The fate of protoplasm is death—death into its chemical constituents; and this determines its origin also. Protoplasm can originate only in that into which it dies,—the elements—the carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen—of which it was found to consist. Hydrogen, with oxygen, forms water; carbon, with oxygen, carbonic acid; and hydrogen, with nitrogen, ammonia. Similarly, water, carbonic acid and ammonia form, in union, protoplasm. The influence of pre-existing protoplasm only determines combination in its case, as that of the electric spark determines combination in the case of water. Protoplasm, then, is but an aggregate of physical materials, exhibiting in combination—only as was to be expected—new properties. The properties of water are not more different from those of hydrogen and oxygen than the properties of protoplasm are different from those of water, carbonic acid, and ammonia. We have the same warrant to attribute the consequences to the premises in the one case as in the other. If, on the first stage of combination, represented by that of water, simples could unite into something so different from themselves, why, on the second stage of combination, represented by that of protoplasm, should not compounds similarly unite into something equally different from themselves? If the constituents are credited with the properties there, why refuse to credit the constituents with the properties here? To the constituents of protoplasm, in truth, any new element, named vitality, has no more been added, than to the constituents of water any new element, named aquosity. Nor is there any logical halting place between this conclusion and the further and final one: That all vital action whatever, intellectual included, is but the result of the molecular forces of the protoplasm which displays it.