Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley — Volume 3

by Thomas Henry Huxley

Yours very faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

In addition to the directly controversial articles in the early part of the year, two other articles on controversial subjects belong to 1891. "Hasisadra's Adventure," published in the "Nineteenth Century" for June, completed his long-contemplated examination of the Flood myth. In this he first discussed the Babylonian form of the legend recorded upon the clay tablets of Assurbanipal—a simpler and less exaggerated form as befits an earlier version, and in its physical details keeping much nearer to the bounds of probability.

The greater part of the article, however, is devoted to a wider question—How far does geological and geographical evidence bear witness to the consequences which must have ensued from a universal flood, or even from one limited to the countries of Mesopotamia? And he comes to the conclusion that these very countries have been singularly free from any great changes of the kind for long geological periods.

The sarcastic references in this article to those singular reasoners who take the possibility of an occurrence to be the same as scientific testimony to the fact of its occurrence, lead up, more or less, to the subject of an essay, "Possibilities and Impossibilities," which appeared in the "Agnostic Annual" for 1892, actually published in October 1891, and to be found in "Collected Essays", 5 192.

This was a restatement of the fundamental principles of the agnostic position, arising out of the controversies of the last two years upon the demonology of the New Testament. The miraculous is not to be denied as impossible; as Hume said, "Whatever is intelligible and can be distinctly conceived implies no contradiction, and can never be proved false by any demonstrative argument or abstract reasoning a priori," and these combinations of phenomena are perfectly conceivable. Moreover, in the progress of knowledge, the miracles of to-day may be the science of to-morrow. Improbable they are, certainly, by all experience, and therefore they require specially strong evidence. But this is precisely what they lack; the evidence for them, when examined, turns out to be of doubtful value.]

I am anxious [he says] to bring about a clear understanding of the difference between "impossibilities" and "improbabilities," because mistakes on this point lay us open to the attacks of ecclesiastical apologists of the type of the late Cardinal Newman.

When it is rightly stated, the Agnostic view of "miracles" is, in my judgment, unassailable. We are NOT justified in the a priori assertion that the order of nature, as experience has revealed it to us, cannot change. In arguing about the miraculous, the assumption is illegitimate, because it involves the whole point in dispute. Furthermore, it is an assumption which takes us beyond the range of our faculties. Obviously, no amount of past experience can warrant us in anything more than a correspondingly strong expectation for the present and future. We find, practically, that expectations, based upon careful observations of past events, are, as a rule, trustworthy. We should be foolish indeed not to follow the only guide we have through life. But, for all that, our highest and surest generalisations remain on the level of justifiable expectations; that is, very high probabilities. For my part, I am unable to conceive of an intelligence shaped on the model of that of men, however superior it might be, which could be any better off than our own in this respect; that is, which could possess logically justifiable grounds for certainty about the constancy of the order of things, and therefore be in a position to declare that such and such events are impossible. Some of the old mythologies recognised this clearly enough. Beyond and above Zeus and Odin, there lay the unknown and inscrutable Fate which, one day or other, would crumple up them and the world they ruled to give place to a new order of things.

I sincerely hope that I shall not be accused of Pyrrhonism, or of any desire to weaken the foundations of rational certainty. I have merely desired to point out that rational certainty is one thing, and talk about "impossibilities," or "violation of natural laws," another. Rational certainty rests upon two grounds; the one that the evidence in favour of a given statement is as good as it can be; the other, that such evidence is plainly insufficient. In the former case, the statement is to be taken as true, in the latter as untrue; until something arises to modify the verdict, which, however properly reached, may always be more or less wrong, the best information being never complete, and the best reasoning being liable to fallacy.

To quarrel with the uncertainty that besets us in intellectual affairs would be about as reasonable as to object to live one's life, with due thought for the morrow, because no man can be sure he will be alive an hour hence. Such are the conditions imposed upon us by nature, and we have to make the best of them. And I think that the greatest mistake those of us who are interested in the progress of free thought can make is to overlook these limitations, and to deck ourselves with the dogmatic feathers which are the traditional adornment of our opponents. Let us be content with rational certainty, leaving irrational certainties to those who like to muddle their minds with them.