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Page 11
Pray understand that I have no � priori objections to the
doctrine. No man who has to deal daily and hourly with nature
can trouble himself about � priori difficulties. Give me such
evidence as would justify me in believing anything else, and
I will believe that. Why should I not? It is not half
so wonderful as the conservation of force, or the
indestructibility of matter. Whoso clearly appreciates
all that is implied in the falling of a stone can have
no difficulty about any doctrine simply on account of its
marvellousness. But the longer I live the more obvious it is
to me that the most sacred act of a man's life is to say
and to feel, "I believe such and such to be true." All the
greatest rewards, and all the heaviest penalties of existence,
cling about that act. The universe is one and the same
throughout; and if the condition of my success in unravelling
some little difficulty of anatomy or physiology is that I
shall rigorously refuse to put faith in that which does not
rest on sufficient evidence, I cannot believe that the great
mysteries of existence will be laid open to me on other terms.
It is of no use to talk to me of analogies and probabilities.
I know what I mean when I say I believe in the law of the
inverse square, and I will not rest my life and my hopes upon
weaker convictions. I dare not if I would.
From such a point of view intellectual veracity takes on a moral
aspect; indeed, it is a pillar of morality. Disregard of it has led
to incalculable social wrong and individual suffering, oppressions and
persecutions, unprogressive obscurantism, joined with perverted ideals
and intellectual arrest. "Ecrasez l'inf�me," cried the reforming
Voltaire; his "infamous" was very much this perverting influence,
exaggerated and armed with power, which had made the great
organization of the Roman Church in his time a monstrous instrument of
autocratic tradition, cruel, rapacious, blindly intolerant, jealous
of light and liberty. In England the growth of political liberty had
deprived the darkest lights of the Church of almost all power for
active interference in the administration of the State, though the
pressure of traditionalism exercised itself less crudely, if scarce
less surely, in the Universities, the Press, religious opinion, and
the army of conventional respectability. So strong was it in social
influence that a man, openly professing to make a guide of his reason
instead of his parson, was liable to be pushed outside the pale.
VI
VERACITY AND AGNOSTICISM
One of the most ticklish of all subjects to handle at this period was
the position of the human species in zoological classification. "It
was a burning question in the sense that those who touched it were
almost certain to burn their fingers severely." In the fifties Sir
William Lawrence had been well-nigh ostracized for his book _On
Man_, "which now might be read in a Sunday-school without surprising
anybody." When Huxley submitted the proofs of _Man's Place in Nature_
to "a competent anatomist, and good friend of his," asking him, if he
could, to point out any errors of fact, the friend--it was Lawrence
himself--declared he could find none, but gave an earnest warning as
to the consequences of publication. Here was one of the cases
where Huxley's firm resolution applied--to speak out if necessary,
regardless of consequences; indeed, he felt sure that all the evil
things prophesied would not be so painful to him as the giving up
that which he had resolved to do upon grounds which he conceived to be
right. As he wrote later (in 1876):--
It seemed to me that a man of science has no _raison d'�tre_
at all unless he is willing to face much greater risks than
these for the sake of that which he believes to be true; and
further, that to a man of science such risks do not count for
much--they are by no means so serious as they are to a man of
letters, for example.
The book was published, and the friend's forecast was amply justified.
The Boreas of criticism blew his hardest blasts of
misrepresentation and ridicule for some years, and I was even
as one of the wicked. Indeed, it surprises me at times to
think how any one who had sunk so low could since have emerged
into, at any rate, relative respectability. Personally, like
the non-corvine personages in the Ingoldsby legend, I did not
feel "one penny the worse." Translated into several languages,
the book reached a wider public than I had ever hoped
for; being largely helped, I imagine, by the Ernulphine
advertisements to which I referred. It has had the honour of
being freely utilized without acknowledgment by writers of
repute; and, finally, it achieved the fate, which is the
euthanasia of a scientific work, of being enclosed among the
rubble of the foundations of later knowledge, and forgotten.
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