502 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



transmutation assumed, which had been made, was in any way adequate to 

 explain the phenomena. Looking back at the state of knowledge at the time, I 

 really do not see that any other conclusion was justifiable. ... As for the 

 " Vestiges," I confess the book simply irritated me by the prodigious ignorance 

 and thoroughly unscientific habit of mind manifested by the writer. If it had 

 any influence at all, it set me against evolution. . . . Thus, looking back into 

 the past, it seems to me that my own position of critical expectancy was just 

 and reasonable. ... So I took refuge in that tatige Skepsis which Goethe has 

 so well defined; and, reversing the apostolic precept to be all things to all men, 

 I usually defended the tenability of received doctrines, when I had to do with 

 the transmutationists ; and stood up for the possibility of transmutation, 

 among the orthodox. 



In this matter Huxley is assuredly a witness whose testimony should 

 not lightly be set aside ; for to his attainments as a naturalist he ordi- 

 narily joined singular logical acumen and rare openness of mind. Yet 

 I think it possible to show that the passage just quoted gives a 

 thoroughly misleading view of the logical status of the argument for 

 evolution, as it existed in the light of the science of the period ; that the 

 attitude which Huxley assumed from 1850 to 1858 was contrary to all 

 sound ideas of scientific method; and that he does the reputations of 

 both Spencer and Chambers serious injustice. I shall attempt to es- 

 tablish these conclusions mainly by showing that the arguments and 

 facts chiefly relied upon by Huxley himself and other early champions 

 of transformism were entirely familiar and well authenticated from 

 fifteen to twenty years before 1859, and had virtually all been clearly 

 noted and pertinently used in the published evolutionary reasonings of 

 Chambers or of Spencer. The truth is — as the evidence to be adduced 

 will make clear — that Huxley's strongly emotional and highly pugnaci- 

 ous nature was held back by certain wholly non-logical influences from 

 accepting an hypothesis for which the evidence was practically as 

 potent for over a decade before he accepted it as it was at the time of his 

 conversion. These influences did not in Huxley's case, as they did in so 

 many others, proceed from religious tradition or temperamental con- 

 servatism. But Huxley had unquestionably been strongly repelled by 

 the " Vestiges." The book was written in a somewhat exuberant and 

 rhetorical style; with all its religious heterodoxy, it was characterized 

 by a certain pious and edifying tone, and was given to abrupt transi- 

 tions from scientific reasoning to mystical sentiment; it contained 

 numerous blunders in matters of biological and geological detail; and 

 its author inclined to believe, on the basis of some rather absurd ex- 

 perimental evidence, in the possibility of spontaneous generation. All 

 these things were offensive to the professional standards of an en- 

 thusiastic young naturalist, scrupulous about the rigor of the game, 

 intolerant of vagueness and of any mixture of the romantic imagina- 

 tion with scientific inquiry, a little the victim, perhaps, of the current 

 scientific cant about " Baconian induction," and quite incapable of 



