TEE ORIGIN OF SPECIES 5°3 



taking, towards any doctrine or movement, any attitude intermediate 

 between contemptuous hostility and ardent partizanship. Full ad- 

 vantage, moreover, had been taken, by the eminent scientists who were 

 also champions of religious orthodoxy, of the faults of Chambers's 

 book; they contrived very successfully to put about the impression that 

 to be a " Vestigiarian " was to be " unscientific " and sentimental and 

 absurd. These were three qualities which Huxley would have been 

 peculiarly averse to being charged with. Finally, he seems to have been 

 exasperated most of all by a single loose piece of phraseology that now 

 and then recurs in the " Vestiges." Chambers, namely, was prone to 

 speak of " laws " as if they were causes and, more particularly, as if 

 they were secondary causes to which the " Divine Will " delegated its 

 agency and control. To Huxley, from the beginning of his career, this 

 hypostatizing fashion of referring to "laws of nature" was a bete 

 noire; and in 1887 we still find him pursuing the author of the 

 " Vestiges " with ridicule because of his " pseudo-scientific realism." 8 

 He, therefore, 7 in 1854, almost outdid the Edinburgh Review in the 

 ferocity of his onslaught upon the layman who had ventured to put 

 forward sweeping generalizations upon biological questions while 



• " Science and Pseudo-science," 1887. Huxley's criticisms are curiously 

 beside the mark. He argues that, whether you suppose that the Creator operates 

 uniformly but directly " according to such rules as he thinks fit to lay down 

 for himself," or that " he made the eosmical machine and then left it to itself," 

 in either case his " personal responsibility is involved " in every result into 

 which this uniform operation works out. But Chambers, so far from denying 

 this, was especially anxious to insist upon it. What he equally insisted upon, 

 however, was the uniformity of this agency. When he spoke of the Creator as 

 working " through " law, the expression, doubtless, was infelicitous ; but his 

 essential idea was plain and unexceptionable, viz., that neither organic nor 

 inorganic phenomena "result from capricious exertions of creative power; but 

 that they have taken place in a definite order, the statement of which order is 

 what men of science term a natural law." These last words are Huxley's own, 

 uttered in 1862, in an address before the Geological Society. It is, he added, 

 logically possible to regard such a law as " simply the statement of the manner 

 in which a supernatural power has thought fit to act " ; the main thing is that 

 " the existence of the law and the possibility of its discovery by the human 

 intellect " be recognized. This was exactly the essence of the view for which 

 Chambers was contending. Huxley was so unduly enraged by a bit of unscien- 

 tific looseness of language that he actually overlooked the important idea which 

 that language was manifestly intended to express. 



T I have not had access to this article, published in the Medical and Chirurg- 

 ical Review; but its character is sufficiently indicated in the correspondence of 

 Huxley and Darwin. The former speaks of it as " the only review I ever have 

 qualms of conscience about, on the ground of needless savagery." Darwin 

 thought it " rather hard on the poor author " ; and added a curiously mild 

 intimation of his own belief: "I am perhaps no fair judge; for I am almost 

 as unorthodox about species as the ' Vestiges ' itself, though I hope not quite 

 so unphilosophical " ("More Letters of Charles Darwin," I., 75). 



