High Minds

by Simon Heffer

  Huxley wrote glowing reviews of On the Origin of Species, seeing it as a massive intellectual breakthrough but also as a weapon in the battle for the cause of liberalism. He was fascinated not just by evolution but by the pursuit of perfectibility of the species, and of a more metaphysical definition of perfectibility too. He attended a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science held in Oxford – appropriately, in the University’s Natural History Museum – at the end of June 1860. There was a debate on Darwin’s research between Huxley and the Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce. Huxley had already warmed up in a public attack on Owen, who had reiterated his theory of the hippocampus minor, which Huxley now saw as a contradiction of Darwin.

  Bishop Wilberforce was the son of the emancipator of the slaves; he was also known as Soapy Sam, after his saponaceous personality. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society, and was a vice-president of the British Association, which existed to popularise the study. He was also an ornithologist. He became Bishop of Oxford in 1845, when just forty. As an undergraduate he had been famed for his debating skills, and was regarded as one of the most formidable orators of his day. Oratory, however, relies to an extent for its success on content: and Wilberforce, though a regular writer for the reviews on scientific and neo-scientific subjects, had less idea what he was talking about than Huxley. Darwin was ill and could not attend, but was lucky to have so intelligent and articulate a partisan as Huxley. He had written to Darwin the previous February to describe an argument he had with Wilberforce about On the Origin of Species, in which the Bishop had said the book was ‘the most unphilosophical he had ever read’.53

  No transcript exists of the debate: but many accounts were written, and from them it is possible to reconstruct a sense of what went on. The most comprehensive reconstruction was by J. R. Lucas. Wilberforce claimed to be guided by logic. He objected to Darwin’s views ‘solely on scientific grounds’.54 He did not, he added, find against Darwin because he believed him ‘to contradict what it appears . . . is taught by Revelation.’ One report said that he found against Darwin because when his theory was ‘tried by the principles of inductive science’ it ‘broke down’. He told his audience that Darwin had offered a hypothesis, not a theory; and he was glad to know that many scientists felt as he did, and that the theory was ‘opposed to the interests of science and humanity’. Darwin had been ‘unphilosophical’ and had founded his beliefs on ‘fancy’.

  Wilberforce’s key point was that there was no evidence in the geological record of one species mutating into another – rock pigeons, as he said, had always been rock pigeons. According to Lucas, Darwin explained this away by referring to the ‘imperfection of the geological record’. At the time, Darwin was modest enough to admit that Wilberforce, in his reading of On the Origin of Species, had spotted all his conjectural points, and had made hay with them. Lucas cited a reminiscence written in 1898 in Macmillan’s Magazine, by one who was present. The writer recalls what became the most celebrated moment of this celebrated battle, when Huxley demolished Wilberforce. The Bishop, ‘turning to his antagonist with a smiling insolence, he begged to know, was it through his grandfather or his grandmother that he claimed descent from a monkey? On this Mr Huxley slowly and deliberately arose. A slight tall figure stern and pale, very quiet and very grave, he stood before us, and spoke those tremendous words – words which no-one seems sure of now, nor I think, could remember just after they were spoken, for their meaning took away our breath, though it left us in no doubt as to what it was. He was not ashamed to have a monkey for his ancestor; but he would be ashamed to be connected with a man who used great gifts to obscure the truth.’ The writer adds that the effect of this rebuke ‘was tremendous’. A woman fainted and had to be carried out. Although Wilberforce still took much of the audience with him, Huxley was later mobbed and acclaimed for what a substantial minority present saw as his triumph. When somebody said to him later that he wished the moment could come again, Huxley answered: ‘Once in a lifetime is enough, if not too much.’

  Another version has Huxley saying he would rather be descended from an ape than from a bishop; but there is less satisfactory evidence of that. He also apparently turned to his neighbour before answering Wilberforce and pronounced: ‘The Lord hath delivered him into my hands.’55 Some thought that, whatever was said precisely, Huxley’s tone had been insolent; but then so did others believe the Bishop’s had been, and he was overdue for a comeuppance. Huxley himself denied having been so rude to Wilberforce, and when the Bishop’s biography attributed the remark to Huxley some years later, Huxley demanded, and received, a correction. Huxley believed he had said: ‘If I had to choose between being descended from an ape or from a man who would use his great powers of rhetoric to crush an argument, I should prefer the former.’ He did admit, in September 1860, that he felt Wilberforce had gone at him ‘vulgarly’ and he had, therefore, ‘determined to punish him’. Another observer, Canon Farrar, later told Huxley’s son that the Bishop had lowered the spirits of his own supporters who were present, because ‘they recognised that the Bishop had forgotten to behave like a gentleman’. Wilberforce, in protesting against the theory of natural selection, was supported by some scientists present, notably Owen and Benjamin Brodie. Huxley’s main point against Wilberforce, however, was that Darwin was a starting point in the new theory of evolution – it was a basis upon which a new line of inquiry could proceed. It was not a finished theorem. But it broke sufficient new ground to stimulate further inquiry, and to change, as it were, the direction of travel.

  There were other bizarre incidents at this sensational meeting, which attracted 700 people because of the interest that had so quickly blown up around Darwin’s work. A don disputed Darwin’s evolutionary theory on the grounds that Homer had existed three millennia earlier and yet had never been replicated, let alone improved upon; and a naval officer from the Beagle held up a bible and pleaded that it, and not Darwin, should be the basis of all understanding. This was truly a turning point; though like many such moments in history, its pivotal nature was only more apparent as time passed. It guaranteed Darwin a serious hearing. It threw the Church on the defensive. It boosted Huxley’s reputation as a scientist. It did no damage at the time to Wilberforce, and indeed was looked back upon for the rest of the Victorian period as a triumph for him. Given what we now know, from the line of inquiry established by Darwin, what happened in Oxford on 30 June 1860 can be seen with hindsight as the end of the medieval world, whose ideas were so often rooted in blind faith, and the start of the modern, whose ideas were so often rooted in rationalism. Over the next few decades Darwin’s conjectures were replaced by facts, not least as the study of geology became more detailed. Huxley, unlike Darwin, remained implacably opposed to clergy, and refused to believe (even, according to Lucas, when confronted with them) that any clergyman could believe in evolution. Huxley felt that science and religion had to contradict each other. Wilberforce seems, oddly, never to have been quite so dogmatic, nor so determined to seek a confrontation between the two forces. That, though, may have been because Soapy Sam was not interested in the possibilities of defeat, and Huxley felt a rational future relied upon Sam and his kind being defeated.

  At the end of On the Origin of Species, Darwin asks:

  Why . . . have all the most eminent living naturalists and geologists rejected this view of the mutability of species? It cannot be asserted that organic beings in a state of nature are subject to no variation; it cannot be proved that the amount of variation in the course of long ages is a limited quantity; no clear distinction has been, or can be, drawn between species and well-marked varieties . . . The belief that species were immutable productions was almost unavoidable as long as the history of the world was thought to be of short duration; and now that we have acquired some idea of the lapse of time, we are too apt to assume, without proof, that the geological record is so perfect that it would have afforded us plain evidence of the mutation of species, if they ha
d undergone mutation.56

  He compared the trouble he was having in being believed with Lyell’s struggle thirty years earlier: ‘We are always slow in admitting any great change of which we do not see the intermediate steps . . . the mind cannot possibly grasp the full meaning of the term of a hundred million years; it cannot add up and perceive the full effects of many slight variations, accumulated during an almost infinite number of generations.’

  Darwin had to manage the controversy stimulated by On the Origin of Species for the rest of his life: he died in 1882. He would not publicly support atheism – even Huxley, younger and more radical, would never go further than to describe himself as an agnostic, and someone so philosophically committed as Mill still found it hard to be anything other than a closet atheist – but he did say to a correspondent in 1880, who had asked him ‘do you believe in the New Testament?’ that ‘I am sorry to have to inform you that I do not believe in the Bible as a divine revelation, and therefore not in Jesus Christ as the Son of God.’57 When On the Origin of Species was published Harriet Martineau, the essayist and bosom friend of Mrs Carlyle, wrote that it overturned the argument for ‘the being of God’ by design.58

  Between 1860 and 1872 there were five more editions of the book, many of the changes answering specific points raised by Darwin’s critics. The phrase now most associated with him – ‘the survival of the fittest’ – first appeared in the fifth edition in 1869. In 1871 he published The Descent of Man, in which he addressed the very point he had been unwilling to broach in his earlier treatise: that man was descended from apes. This caused profound shock. The wife of the Bishop of Worcester reportedly said to him: ‘Descended from the apes! My dear, let us hope that it is not true, but if it is, let us pray that it will not become generally known.’59 As we shall see, among those who criticised him was Samuel Butler, in his own way one of the most remarkable men of the time, and grandson of Darwin’s headmaster. Butler was not one of those opponents who felt God was being mocked by Darwin’s theories, for he mocked God better than almost anyone. Rather, he disputed that Darwin was breaking new ground.

  Huxley was not merely the great defender of Darwin: he was also the great defender of science, and the man who more than any other in the 1860s and 1870s used his clout to argue for the better teaching – indeed, in most cases, simply the teaching – of science in schools, and of the establishment of scientific departments in universities. By his efforts he gave practical force to the secular idealism of Mill, ensuring that those to whom liberty was being extended had the education to deal with it, and with a world in which technological advance was replacing religious superstition. His motivation appears at all times to advance rationalism. The Clarendon Commission on the Public Schools – whose work is discussed in Chapter 12 – criticised the finest schools in the land for hardly bothering to teach science. For Huxley, this was a scandal. One of the great problems, however, was where to find qualified teachers. In time, Huxley would do all he could to alleviate this – not just by encouraging the wider teaching of science in universities, but by offering six-week summer schools for teachers in his laboratories at South Kensington, as soon as they had opened in 1871: and he managed to persuade Gladstone’s administration to pay for them.

  The most renowned scientists, such as Huxley and Darwin, had been largely self-taught, or had had to conduct research unguided. The clerical domination of the leading schools and the older universities did not allow much for those who would teach science, though the establishment of the Natural Sciences tripos at Cambridge coincided with Huxley’s arrival as a lecturer in palaeontology at the School of Mines in Jermyn Street in the mid-1850s. His eventual achievement (in the teeth of opposition from most of the scientific establishment) was to help turn the School of Mines into the Normal School of Science at South Kensington. In time the Normal School would become the Royal College of Science and, finally, Imperial College, the most formidable scientific institution in the country. But that process would require much struggle and advocacy, not least by Huxley.

  When the South London Working Men’s College was established in 1868 Huxley accepted the role of honorary principal, in which he served until 1880, and where his involvement was far from just ornamental. He was determined to take education, and especially scientific education, to the people. He wished to redefine what was understood by education: he had told an audience at the University of London in 1858 that ‘the time is rapidly approaching when no person who is not moderately conversant with scientific matters will be able to take part in ordinary conversation, or to consider himself an educated person.’60 When Forster’s Education Act of 1870 allowed for the formation of school boards, Huxley stood for election to the one in London, and was successful. From this he was further elected to be chairman of the London School Board’s Scheme of Education Committee, which established the pattern of infant, junior and senior schools that was copied across the country. In this position, Huxley used his influence to expand the reach of the curriculum, to secure the independence of teachers, to enforce standards of hygiene the better to preserve health, to institute a regime of physical training, and to discourage and strictly regulate corporal punishment. He also introduced drawing and music, the latter of which he described (showing the breadth of his own mind) as ‘one of the most civilising and enlightening influences which a child can be brought under.’

  Also, despite his own apparent religious scepticism, and his belief in secularism, he insisted on Bible study being a part of his new curriculum: though this was as much for aesthetic reasons, given what he regarded as the majesty of the Authorised Version, as for any idea that it might inculcate a moral framework into the reader. The condition he expressed was that it be taught ‘with rigid exclusion of any further theological teaching than that contained in the Bible itself.’ However, he hoped the lives of the children would be ‘governed and guided by the love of some ethical ideal’.61 In saying this he was in tune with prevailing public opinion. He did want morality taught in schools, seeing it as something common to those who argued for ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ teaching, and an example of the futility of observing such divisions.

  He had the effect of wrenching a primitive and inadequate education system into the modern world, and making it see the realities of that world. He accomplished this in just eighteen months, giving himself a breakdown of health through overwork, but did say that ‘I can look back upon that period of my life as perhaps the part of it least wasted.’62 He was motivated by his belief that the uneducated classes contained an immeasurable resource of ability of which all were unaware, including the people themselves. He wanted those of talent not to have their educational lives cut off at the age of twelve or thirteen when they left elementary schools: not for the utilitarian reason that they might profit themselves and the country by developing themselves further, but because it was their right to be fulfilled and cruel to them to prevent them from expanding their minds.

  Huxley wanted social reform outside of education. In 1870, as president of the British Association, he told an audience in Liverpool of his outrage at seeing ‘unwashed, unkempt, brutal people side by side with indications of the greatest refinement and the greatest luxury’; and he sympathised with trades unions and socialists in their ‘endeavour to put down the savagery of the world.’63 The way out was ‘a great educational ladder, the bottom of which shall be the gutter, and the top of which shall be the University.’ On another occasion he observed that ‘it is futile to expect a hungry and squalid population to be anything but violent and gross.’64 Huxley toured the country, noting how even relatively impoverished towns in the north of England managed to find the money, with the help of local businesses, to establish technical institutes. London, by contrast, seemed uninterested in training its working men to be better and to progress. To this end he upbraided wealthy livery companies for not doing more to enhance the skills of artisans in their respective trades. After some prodding, the livery companies funded a
technical college in Finsbury that opened in 1883, and the next year opened the City and Guilds College in South Kensington. Although the City provided the money, Huxley provided the expert advice on what should be taught – and how.

  V

  Huxley thought there could be no accommodation between Christianity and Darwinism. However, to some a synthesis was possible. Charles Kingsley was one such. To generations of children in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries The Water-Babies, a tale he wrote for his son Grenville in 1862, is a fairy-story with a message about the wrongness of mistreating children; from that position it moves effortlessly into a morality tale: ‘Those that wish to be clean, clean they will be; and those that wish to be foul, foul they will be.’65 The book is a description of the life of Tom, a chimney-boy routinely abused by his master, who falls in a river, drowns, and is recreated as an aquatic sprite. In this new existence he comes under the sway of fairies such as Mrs Doasyouwouldbedoneby and Mrs Bedonebyasyoudid, who run a regime in which evil is punished and good is rewarded: the message is clear. However, the book is also a vigorous defence of Darwin’s theories and, more to the point, of the importance and necessity of rigorous scientific inquiry; and an assault on the shallowness and prejudice of his critics, by one who as a clergyman might have been expected to count himself among them. He did not feel the theory contradicted his faith. He wrote to Darwin in November 1859 on what Darwin described as ‘such notions as mine being not opposed to a high conception of the Deity’.66