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Updated: May 11, 2025
Huxley's general idea of religion as it is on the lowest known level of material culture through which the ancestors of Israel must have passed like other people has already been criticised. He denied to the most backward races both cult and religious sanction of ethics.
A good expression of the "scientific" state of mind occurs in Huxley's "Life and Letters": "I regret," he writes, "that I am unable to accept the invitation of the Committee of the Dialectical Society. . . . I take no interest in the subject. The only case of 'Spiritualism' I have ever had the opportunity of examining into for myself was as gross an imposture as ever came under my notice.
Professor Huxley's argument, which Dr. Taylor disposes of so summarily, consists of a series of inferences from facts so collected and arranged. They are the things "known or proved," on which, as his legal friend truly says, the reasoning in the process of proof by circumstantial evidence must rest. Now, Dr.
Compare this type of mind with such an opposite type as Ruskin's, or even as J. S. Mill's, or Huxley's, and you realize its peculiarity. Behind the work of those others was a background of overflowing mental temptations. The men loom larger than all their publications, and leave an impression of unexpressed potentialities.
J. Seth, in his Study of Ethical Principles, concludes from Mr. Huxley's Romanes lecture that "agnosticism could scarcely have been the final resting place for such a mind". I have ventured to repeat here a portion of the argument set forth in the chapter on "Ethics and Theism".
Compare Huxley's way of saying things with some other author's way of saying things. Huxley says of his essays to workingmen, "I only wish I had had the sense to anticipate the run these have had here and abroad, and I would have revised them properly. As they stand they are terribly in the rough, from a literary point of view." Do you find evidences of roughness?
"Not having been able to find any clue in Professor Huxley's writings to the steps by which he passes from those vital phenomena, which consist only, in their last analysis, of movements by particles of matter, to those other phenomena which we term thought, sensation, or consciousness; but, knowing that so positive an expression of opinion from him will have great weight with many persons, I shall endeavour to show, with as much brevity as is compatible with clearness, that this theory is not only incapable of proof, but is also, as it appears to me, inconsistent with accurate conceptions of molecular physics."
The end of all his infinite pains about his writing was not because style for its own sake is worth while, but because he saw that the only way to win men to a consideration of his message was to make it perfectly clear and attractive to them. Huxley's message to the people was that happiness, usefulness, and even material prosperity depend upon an understanding of the laws of nature.
Perfect clearness, above every other quality of style, certainly is characteristic of Huxley; but clearness alone does not make subject-matter literature. In addition to this quality, Huxley's writing wins the reader by the racy diction, the homely illustration, the plain, honest phrasing. All these and other qualities bring one into an intimate relationship with his subject.
And, to show that the line of argument here adopted is no mere false asceticism surviving from an undisciplined and pre-scientific age, as the solemn verbiage of so much second-rate talking expresses it to-day, we may quote some words of David Hume, Huxley's "prince of agnostics," from the Essay on Polygamy and Divorce.
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