MODERN BIOLOGY 491 



dealt with in his dispute with another famous politician, the Duke of Argyle, 

 who in a work entitled The Reign of Laiv had opposed Darwinism's lack of con- 

 formity to law in the sense given to it by idealistic natural philosophy. But 

 Huxley sought to influence the contemporary world of ideas also in a posi- 

 tive way; he enunciated the same social ethics that Darwin had taught and 

 that their age so largely embraced; he laboured to make the results of modern 

 natural science the basis of school education instead of the traditional classi- 

 cal languages, and he endeavoured by means of popular writings and lectures 

 to bring them to the knowledge of the general public. As a popular scien- 

 tific writer he is unrivalled for the clearness, warmth, and honesty of his style; 

 he never expresses a view that he cannot defend and never tries to disguise 

 the fact that the capacity of science for explaining phenomena is limited. 

 The same honesty he displayed also as a specialist. He once described a gelati- 

 nous substance taken from the bottom of the sea, which he thought was 

 a kind of undifferentiated, but living plasm, and which in honour of Haeckel 

 he named Bathybius haeckelii; when it was later discovered that the substance 

 was an inanimate precipitation, he frankly and boldly acknowledged his 

 mistake, which Haeckel found it rather difficult to admit. But Huxley was 

 also interested in purely philosophical problems; he was a great admirer of 

 David Hume, the famous sceptic of the eighteenth century, Kant's predeces- 

 sor as a critic of knowledge, and Huxley described his life and teaching in 

 a monograph. He himself represented his theoretical standpoint as agnosti- 

 cism, as a strict insistence upon the impossibility of knowing anything be- 

 yond the actual observations of the senses. And it must be admitted that he 

 succeeded in an unusually high degree in keeping free from the materialistic 

 dogmatism to which the opponents of the traditional ideals of thought and 

 religion are so easily addicted. 



Gray on Darwinism 

 Among the professional botanists, also, Darwin at once found valuable sup- 

 ■ porters. One of these was Asa Gray (1810-88), professor at Harvard Univer- 

 sity and well known as a leading writer on systematic botany and American 

 flora. Immediately after Darwin's appearance he came forward on his behalf 

 and in opposition to his own colleague Agassiz; the contributions he wrote 

 on behalf of the new theory in the course of a number of years he collected 

 in a special book, entitled Darwiniana. In his first review of The Origin of 

 Species he first of all attacks Agassiz's idea of species and then goes on to 

 point out that, even though Darwin was unable to prove his theory of de- 

 scent, he at any rate made an origin of species far less incredible than before. 

 Gray was at great pains to prove that Darwinism could be reconciled to the 

 belief in a personal God, and he likewise sets great store by the Darwinian 

 theory as being better adapted to finding an explanation of the finality in na- 

 ture than earlier theories; he expressly points out that Darwin rehabilitated 



