BOOKS.

MR. HUXLEY'S ESSAYS.*

THE brilliant Prologue prefixed by Mr. Huxley to his recently published volume of Essays, shows certainly that his right

hand has not lost its cunning. But it also gives evidence of the curious one-sidedness of the Professor's treatment of subjects which, before all others, need comprehensiveness of thought. Professor Huxley has often enough expressed his disapproval of the mediaeval inquisitor, and yet there is some- thing inquisitorial in his own manner of enforcing the creed.

of modern science. His penalties are more suited to our own. times than those of his Spanish prototype. The excom- munication which he summons to his aid at the outset is the summary exclusion of his victims from the category of those whom the Popes of modern scientific thought admit to be reasonable men. The penalties he inflicts on such recusants as Mr. Gladstone and the Duke of Argyll, though often sug- gestive of both fire and sword, are suited to days when punitive heat and sharpness are confined to the limits of a, controversial volume. But the downright charges of scientific heresy, the arrogant contempt for his victims, the peremptory challenge to instant submission, are there. Like the inquisitor, he sits as a Judge, and he judges as a partisan.

The tone of the Prologue is, perhaps, less aggressive than that of his recent sallies here republished on Harisadra's Adventure, on Mr. Gladstone and Genesis, on the Evolution of Theology ; but the substance is not less one-sided. Starting with the broad' contrast familiar to all, of "Nature and Supernature,"—a contrast which is due to those elements in the world which are clearly subject to rule, and those, on the other hand, which appear, at first sight, to be capricious, and are attributed by the " untutored reason, little more, as yet, than the playfellow of the imagination," to beings above and beyond the natural world,—he describes the antithesis between the students of both orders. Practically, he maintains, the study of Nature has ever tended to discredit the supernatural, and the belief in the supernatural has tended to the neglect of the natural.

"The theoretical antithesis brought about a practical antagonism. From the earliest times of which we have any knowledge, naturalism and supernaturalism have consciously or unconsciously- competed and struggled with one another ; and the varying features of the contest are written in the records of the course of civilisation, from those of Egypt and Babylon, six thousand years ago, down to those of our own time and people. These records. inform us that, so far as men have paid attention to Nature, they have been rewarded for their pains. They have developed the Arts which have furnished the conditions of civilised existence ; and the Sciences which have been a progressive revelation of reality, and have afforded the best discipline of the mind in the methods of discovering truth. They have accumulated a vast body of universally accepted knowledge ; and the conceptions of man and of society, of morals and of law, based upon that know- ledge, are every day more and more either openly or tacitly acknowledged to be the foundations of right action. History also tells us that the field of the supernatural has rewarded its culti- vators with a harvest perhaps not less luxuriant, but of a different character. It has produced an almost infinite diversity of Religions. These, if we set aside the ethical concomitants upon which natural knowledge has also a claim, are composed of information about Supernature ; they tell us of the attributes of supernatural beings, of their relations with Nature, and of the operations by which their interference with the ordinary course of events can be secured or averted. It does not appear, however, that supernatnraliste have attained to any agreement about these matters, or that history indicates a • Essays upon sone Controverted Questions. By Thomas H. Huxley, F.H.B. London Macmillan and Co. 1892.

widening of the influence of supernaturalism on practice, with the onward flow of time. On the contrary, the various religions are to a great extent mutually exclusive, and their adherents delight in charging each other not merely with error but with criminality,deservin g and ensuring punishment of infinite severity. In singular contrast with natural knowledge, again, the acquaint- ance of mankind with the supernatural appears the more exten- sive and the more exact, and the influence of supernatural doctrines on conduct the greater the further back we go in time and the lower the stage of civilisation submitted to investigation. Histori- cally, indeed, there would seem to be an inverse relation between supernatural and natural knowledge. As the latter has widened and spread in precision and trustworthiness, so has the former shrunk, grown vague, and questionable ; as the one has more and more filled the sphere of action, so has the other retreated into the sphere of meditation, or vanished behind the screen of mere verbal recognition. Whether this difference of the fortunes of naturalism and of supernaturalism is an instance of the pro- gress or of the regress of humanity, is a matter of opinion. The point to which I wish to direct attention is that the difference exists, and is making itself felt. Men are growing to be seriously alive to the fact that the historical evolution of humanity, which is generally, and, I venture to think, not unreasonably regarded as progress, has been, and is being, accompanied by a co-ordinate elimination of the supernatural from its originally large occupation of men's thoughts. The question, How far is this progress to go ? ' is, in my apprehension, the Controverted Question of our time."

We confess that it is to us singular and not encouraging

that an able thinker of our own days should write thus. Mr. Huxley simply passes over with an implicit and unsupported denial the contentions on which every man who differs from

him lays most stress. The civilising influence of the Christian

Church is a common-place of history ; and the great religious reaction of the present century took its origin in a convic- tion professing to be due to the experienced results of the eighteenth century scepticism, that belief in the natural with- out belief in the supernatural will not "furnish the conditions of civilised existence ; " that the study of Nature apart from the study of Supernature fails to give adequate "conceptions

of man and of society, of morals and of law." The indissoluble connection between ethical conduct and religious conviction has been the theme of numberless modern thinkers in Germany, France, England, America, many of whom have formed their religious philosophy on the basis of Kant's Critique of Practical

Beason. Yet the ethical question is set aside by Mr. Huxley with the remark that "natural knowledge also has a claim" on ethics;

and the contention that supernatural sanctions are neces- sary as a basis for civilisation is simply ignored. The con-

tention of the thinkers in question has been that Mr. Huxley's facts are untrue to history. They maintained that conduct has ever been, in fact, due to supernatural belief, and has not been preserved without it, and that an orderly social life, with its necessary condition of an effective civil authority,

has not been maintained without religious convictions. They had seen the failure of Rousseau's substitute of a religion of sentiment for one of faith, and they invoked the facts of his- tory to show that belief in the supernatural was the only sanction and the only effective basis of a social morality; though secular knowledge might make its precepts more definite. This argument no doubt falls short of establishing the truth of any one form of belief in the supernatural, but

it is an a fortiori argument against Mr. Huxley. If he fails to establish historically his main contention that belief in the supernatural is useless, more still does he fail to prove it un- reasonable as well. But, keeping merely to the ground he takes up, his picture is untrue to life. His antithesis is between the study of Nature and its results in improved civili-

sation, both of the individual and of society, on the one hand ; and supernatural belief and barbarism, on the other. Where will such men as Bacon and Isaac Newton be placed in such a scheme No doubt the narrowness of specialists is pro- verbial, and the saying, Chi tree medici, ihi duo athei, holds good widely ; but directly we are in contact with great and broad minds, the contrast between the believers in Nature and in Supernature fails to support his contention. Again,to pass from persons to civilisations. Does loss of faith—even of superstitious faith—mean necessarily gain for social life On which side will he range the Roman Republic in its palmy days—with its heroism, its unquestioning faith, its civic life, with those qualities which made the Roman name the greatest in the world, and on the other, the Roman Empire in the days of Petronius, when intellectual criticism had destroyed the corporate faith, and when attention to "Nature" and disbelief in " Snpernature " had issued in the morals of the Satyricon ? The truth is, that like all such bald antitheses, Mr. Huxley's is very inexact. George Eliot has spoken of that " frag- mentary doubt-provoking knowledge which we call truth," and the completeness of Mr. Huxley's theories always makes them suspect. The old-fashioned idea was that faith was a very noble thing, though it might degenerate into superstition ; that the study of Nature was indispensable for material civilisation, but that society needs also moral civilisation as a basis for material, and that this is practically only attainable by belief in supernatural sanctions of the moral law. This statement, commonplace and antiquated though it is, seems a good deal truer to the facts of history than Mr. Huxley's contentions. Indeed, in some cases the claims of the devotees of " Supernature " to be bene- factors of mankind are so obvious that Mr. Huxley needs all his skill to evade them. He is equal to the occasion, how- ever, and when be finds the Hebrew Prophets uncomfortably strong on this ground, by a prompt and bold manceuvre he claims them for himself. They are described by him as the representatives of "ethical criticism," and not of theological belief.

One further remark in conclusion. Mr. Huxley is at pains in one of his essays, to trace the evolution of Theological beliefs, by means of known causes of human error. from primitive and simpler to later and more complex superstition. We have seen that he finds the Prophets a difficult phenomenon to work into his system ; and, had we space, we might criticise his treatment on other grounds. But there is one broad fact to which we would call his attention. Evolution in the physical world is the story of the gradual development of further and more exact relations with the environment. In the progress of animal life it is the rise to further knowledge. Between the eyespots which, early in the history of sentient life, localise sensitiveness to light, and the wonderful structure of the human eye whose retina reflects exactly every feature of the outside world, there is a constant refinement and im- provement in the medium by which knowledge is attained. A great external reality is making itself gradually appre- hended more and more exactly by the sentient being. So, too, with the growth of touch and of hearing. The whole story of the evolution of the organs of sense in the animal kingdom is the story of a reality, dimly and uncertainly perceived at first as not self, being gradually and more and more surely both recognised and understood. Is it not, on the face of it, an incongruous and improbable supposition that with belief in the supernatural the course of evolution should be just the reverse ? Is it not, on the face of it, more likely that the advance of religious belief among the Israelites, from the superstitious stage to the purer monotheism of the prophets, and from that monotheism, with its imperfect ethical concep- tions, to Christian theism, represents the gradual and more certain apprehension of a great reality, rather than an aimless wandering through accretions of delusion ? Is not the persistence of belief in the supernatural through so many superstitious forms, of which Mr. Huxley makes so much, some sign that a reality has been making its way to us through inaccuracy and error, due to the imperfection of mental and moral structure ? Mr. Huxley notes skilfully the insufficiency and inaccuracy of the eye-spot ; but does that throw doubt on the trustworthiness of the eye as a medium of knowledge?