Man's Place in Nature, and Other Essays. Thomas Henry Huxley
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understood, therefore, that science is one thing, and philosophy another: that science most properly concerns itself with matter and motion, and reduces phenomena, as far as it can, to mechanism. The more successfully it does that, the more it fulfils its end and aim; but when, on the strength of that achievement, it seeks to blossom into a philosophy, when it endeavours to conclude that its scope is complete and all-inclusive, that nothing exists in the universe but mechanism, and that the aspect of things from a scientific point of view is their only aspect—then it is becoming narrow and bigoted and deserving of rebuke. Such rebuke it received from Huxley, such rebuke it will always receive from scientific men who realize properly the magnitude of existence and the vast potentialities of the universe.
Our opportunities of exploration are good as far as they go, but they are not extensive; we live as it were in the mortar of one of the stones of St. Paul’s Cathedral; and yet so assiduously have we cultivated our faculties that we can trace something of the outline of the whole design and have begun to realize the plan of the building—a surprising feat for insects of limited faculty. And—continuing the parable—two schools of thought have arisen: one saying that it was conceived in the mind of an architect and designed and built wholly by him, the other saying that it was put together stone by stone in accordance with the laws of mechanics and physics. Both statements are true, and those that emphasize the latter are not thereby denying the existence of Christopher Wren, though to the unwise enthusiasts on the side of design they may appear to be doing so. Each side is stating a truth, and neither side is stating the whole truth. Nor should we find it easy with all our efforts to state the whole truth exhaustively, even about such a thing as that. Those who deny any side of truth are to that extent unbelievers, and Huxley was righteously indignant with those shortsighted bigots who blasphemed against that aspect of divine truth which had been specially revealed to him. This is what he lived to preach, and to this he was faithful to the uttermost.
Let him be thought of as a devotee of truth, and a student of the more materialistic side of things, but never let him be thought of as a philosophical materialist or as one who abounded in cheap negations.
The objection which it is necessary to express concerning Materialism as a complete system is based not on its assertions but on its negations. In so far as it makes positive assertions, embodying the result of scientific discovery and even of scientific speculation based thereupon, there is no fault to find with it; but when, on the strength of that, it sets up to be a philosophy of the universe—all inclusive, therefore, and shutting out a number of truths otherwise perceived, or which appeal to other faculties, or which are equally true and are not really contradictory of legitimately materialistic statements—then it is that its insufficiency and narrowness have to be displayed. As Professor Ritchie said:—“The ‘legitimate materialism of the sciences’ simply means temporary and convenient abstraction from the cognitive conditions under which there are ‘facts’ or ‘objects’ for us at all; it is ‘dogmatic materialism’ which is metaphysics of the bad sort.”
It will be probably instructive, and it may be sufficient, if I show that two great leaders in scientific thought (one the greatest of all men of science who have yet lived), though well aware of much that could be said positively on the materialistic side, and very willing to admit or even to extend the province of science or exact knowledge to the uttermost, yet were very far from being philosophic materialists or from imagining that other modes of regarding the universe were thereby excluded.
Great leaders of thought, in fact, are not accustomed to take a narrow view of existence, or to suppose that one mode of regarding it, or one set of formulæ expressing it, can possibly be sufficient and complete. Even a sheet of paper has two sides: a terrestrial globe presents different aspects from different points of view; a crystal has a variety of facets; and the totality of existence is not likely to be more simple than any of these—is not likely to be readily expressible in any form of words, or to be thoroughly conceivable by any human mind.
It may be well to remember that Sir Isaac Newton was a Theist of the most pronounced and thorough conviction, although he had a great deal to do with the reduction of the major Cosmos to mechanics, i.e., with its explanation by the elaborated machinery of simple forces; and he conceived it possible that, in the progress of science, this process of reduction to mechanics would continue till it embraced nearly all the phenomena of nature. (See extract below.) That, indeed, has been the effort of science ever since, and therein lies the legitimate basis for materialistic statements, though not for a materialistic philosophy.
The following sound remarks concerning Newton are taken from Huxley’s “Hume,” p. 246:—
“Newton demonstrated all the host of heaven to be but the elements of a vast mechanism, regulated by the same laws as those which express the falling of a stone to the ground. There is a passage in the preface to the first edition of the ‘Principia’ which shows that Newton was penetrated, as completely as Descartes, with the belief that all the phenomena of nature are expressible in terms of matter and motion:—
“ ‘Would that the rest of the phenomena of nature could be deduced by a like kind of reasoning from mechanical principles. For many circumstances lead me to suspect that all these phenomena may depend upon certain forces, in virtue of which the particles of bodies, by causes not yet known, are either mutually impelled against one another, and cohere into regular figures, or repel and recede from one another; which forces being unknown, philosophers have as yet explored nature in vain. But I hope that, either by this method of philosophizing, or by some other and better, the principles here laid down may throw some light upon the matter.’ ”
Here is a full-blown anticipation of an intelligible exposition of the Universe in terms of matter and force—the substantial basis of what smaller men call materialism and develop into what they consider to be a materialistic philosophy. But there is no necessity for any such scheme; and Professor Huxley himself, who is commonly spoken of by half-informed people as if he were a philosophic materialist, was really nothing of the kind; for although, like Newton, fully imbued with the mechanical doctrine, and of course far better informed concerning the biological departments of nature, and the discoveries which have in the last century been made—and though he rightly regarded it as his mission to make the scientific point of view clear to his benighted contemporaries, and was full of enthusiasm for the facts on which materialists take their stand—he saw clearly that these alone were insufficient for a philosophy. The following extracts from the Hume volume will show that he entirely repudiated materialism as a satisfactory or complete philosophical system, and that he was especially severe on gratuitous denials applied to provinces beyond our scope:—
“While it is the summit of human wisdom to learn the limit of our faculties, it may be wise to recollect that we have no more right to make denials, than to put forth affirmatives, about what lies beyond that limit. Whether either mind or matter has a ‘substance’ or not, is a problem which we are incompetent to discuss: and it is just as likely that the common notions upon the subject should be correct as any others. … ‘The same principles which, at first view, lead to scepticism, pursued to a certain point, bring men back to common sense’ ” (p. 282).
“Moreover, the ultimate forms of existence which we distinguish in our little speck of the universe are, possibly, only two out of infinite varieties of existence, not only analogous to matter and analogous to mind, but of kinds which we are not competent so much as to conceive—in the midst of which, indeed, we might be set down, with no more notion of what was about us, than the worm in a flower-pot, on a London balcony, has of the life of the great city.” (p. 286)
And again on pp. 251 and 279:—
“It is worth any amount of trouble to … know by one’s own knowledge the great truth … that the honest and rigorous following up of the argument which leads us to ‘materialism’ inevitably carries us beyond it.”
“To sum up. If the materialist affirms that the universe and all its phenomena are resolvable into matter and motion, Berkeley replies, True; but what you call matter and motion are known to us only as forms of consciousness; their being is to be conceived or known; and the existence of a state of consciousness apart from a thinking mind is a contradiction in terms.
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