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Page 12
To my observation, human nature has not sensibly changed
during the last thirty years. I doubt not that there are
truths as plainly obvious, and as generally denied, as
those contained in _Man's Place in Nature_, now awaiting
enunciation. If there is a young man of the present generation
who has taken as much trouble as I did to assure himself that
they are truths, let him come out with them, without troubling
his head about the barking of the dogs of St. Ernulphus.
_Veritas praevalebit_--some day; and even if she does not
prevail in his time, he himself will be all the better and
wiser for having tried to help her. And let him recollect
that such great reward is full payment for all his labour and
pains.
To speak out thus was one side of his passion for veracity. When it
was a matter of demonstrable truth, he refused to be intimidated by
great names. Already, in his Croonian lecture of 1858, "On the
Theory of the Vertebrate Skull," he had challenged, and by direct
morphological investigation overthrown, the theory of Oken, adopted
and enlarged upon by Owen, that the adult skull is a modified
vertebral column. Again, the great name of Owen, that jealous king of
the anatomical world, had in 1857 supported the assertion, so contrary
to the investigations of Huxley himself and of other anatomists, that
certain anatomical features of the brain are peculiar to the genus
_Homo_, and are a ground for placing that genus separately from all
other mammals--in a division, Archencephala, apart from and superior
to the rest. Huxley thereupon re-investigated the whole question, and
soon satisfied himself that these structures were not peculiar to man,
but are common to all the higher and many of the lower apes. This led
him to study the whole question of the structural relations of man to
the next lower existing forms. Without embarking on controversy, he
embodied his conclusions in his teaching.
Thus, in 1860, he was well prepared to follow up Darwin's words in the
_Origin of Species_, "Light will be thrown on the origin of man and
his history," and to furnish proofs in the field of Development and
Vertebrate Anatomy, which were not among Darwin's many specialities.
When Owen, at the Oxford meeting of the British Association, repeated
his former assertions, he publicly took up the challenge. On the
technical side, a series of dissections undertaken by himself,
Rolleston, and Flower displayed the structures for all to see; on the
popular side, Huxley delivered in 1860 a course of public lectures
which were the basis of his book, _Man's Place in Nature_, above
mentioned.
Here the principle is actively exemplified: speak out fearlessly at
the right moment to strike down that which is demonstrably false. It
is the counterpart to the other aspect of veracity which will not say
"I believe" to an unverified assertion. These two aspects of the
same principle, as has been seen, developed hand in hand in his early
career; but it was the active challenge to ill-based authority which,
by its courage, not to say audacity, first attracted public notice
and public abuse. The other, the apparently negative aspect, came into
general notice only after 1869. Its very reserves, however, resting on
a statement of reasons for finding the testimony to certain doctrines
insufficient, had long provoked assaults from the upholders of these
doctrines, which made no less call upon his courage and endurance.
As a philosophic position, however, it was not formally and publicly
defined until, in the debates of the Metaphysical Society founded in
that year, he invented for himself the label of Agnostic. The Society
was composed of distinguished men, representing almost every shade of
opinion and intellectual occupation; University professors, statesmen,
lawyers, bishops and deans, a Cardinal, a poet; men of science and
men of letters; Anglicans, Roman Catholics, Unitarians, Positivists,
Freethinkers.
The story is told in his article on "Agnosticism," written in 1889
(_Collected Essays_, v, 237). After describing how it came about that
his mind "steadily gravitated towards the conclusions of Hume and
Kant," so well stated by the latter as follows:--
The greatest and perhaps the sole use of all philosophy of
pure reason is, after all, merely negative, since it serves
not as an organon for the enlargement (of knowledge), but as
a discipline for its delimitation; and, instead of discovering
truth, has only the modest merit of preventing error--
he proceeds:--
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