Darwin said of Thomas Huxley: “My good and kind agent for the propagation of the Gospels, i.e. the Devil’s gospel.” Huxley was known for lunging (figuratively) at his opponents. He was Darwin’s Rottweiler. No one stirred passions like Thomas Henry Huxley. Adrian Desmond (Darwin’s biographer) has written an absolutely fascinating biography of this man. “Huxley was one of the founders of the skeptical scientific twentieth century. We owe to him that enduring military metaphor, the ‘war’ of science against theology. He coined the word ‘agnostic’ and contributed to the West’s existential crisis.” Desmond’s biography is a contextual history of the man and his ideas. “How did England’s vicarage view of a designed, happy world of 1830 become the cold, causal, and Calvinistic evolutionary vista of 1870. . . . This is a story of Class, Power and Propaganda.” Huxley virtually created the profession of scientist. Much of his antagonism to the established church arose with the general “industrial Dissent,” a backlash of the underprivileged against the upper social strata typified by the Anglican hierarchy. “Huxley boosted the ‘Scientists’ ‘ profile by trenching on the clergyman’s domain, raising the territorial tension by equating authority with technical expertise.” The English schools of 1870 rejected science as “useless and dehumanizing.” Their world was constructed around the classics and theology. The universities were “finishing schools” for prosperous Anglicans.” Huxley’s great feat was persuading society that science was essential to an industrial nation.
Huxley did not begin hating religion, but the experience of his youth as an apprentice drug-grinder who wandered through the poverty-stricken, rat infested, sewage-laden London of 1841 where children were literally starving in front of him made him question the validity of a religion that had failed to help these people. Huxley spent several years studying at Charing Cross Hospital on scholarship. The honor came from successful competition on a very hard exam sponsored by the Apothecaries Guild. He was the ultimate academic and could often be found dissecting corpses past normal hours. Corpses were plentiful: the squalid poor who could not be allowed in the front door for treatment of mere starvation, arrived often by the back door for the morgue. At the end of his studies he was considerably in debt, having had to pay for food and lodging, so he went to sea as surgeon's mate on the recommendation of a friend. The ship was the Rattlesnake, whose captain was as interested as Huxley in scientific observation.
Regretfully, the numbers of books he purchased for the voyage added to his debt. On any long voyage, one has a great deal of time to speculate about things, and Huxley began moving away from the orthodox. “It is not what we believe, but why we believe it. Moral responsibility lies in diligently weighing the evidence. We must actively doubt; we have to scrutinize our views, not take them on trust. No virtue attached to blindly accepting orthodoxy, however ‘venerable’ . . . .”
Huxley remained a devotee of reason and intellect, but he was not anti-religion. “My screed,” he wrote, “was meant as a protest against Theology & Parsondom . . . both of which are in my mind the natural and irreconcilable enemies of Science. Few see it but I believe we are on the Eve of a new Reformation and if I have a wish to live thirty years, it is that I may see the foot of Science on the necks of her Enemies. But the new religion will not be a worship of the intellect alone.” He meant to retain the moral core, the ethics of love and duty, but stripping Christian mythic excrescences. “In his own pugilistic way, he was proving that evolutionary heterodoxy did not equal moral delinquency.”
Huxley was a brilliant lecturer whose perorations became famous. It was common practice for experts in shorthand to take down the words of a speaker and rush them into print, a sort of piracy, as Huxley received no royalties, but the fabulously successful little books did much to popularize Darwin’s ideas. Perhaps Desmond overstates Huxley’s triumph of rationalism over darkness for, as reviewer James Kincaid said in his review in The New York Times, the “contemporary United States seems to me about as skeptical, scientific and agnostic as a 10th century tribe of frogworshipers.”
