Fig Leaves and 'Shamefaced Materialism'

...Huxley urged that the great essential was to dig below words to things...

...That formulation adroitly turns the tables on the Marxists, doesn't it...

...in the heart of a world of idolatrous polytheists, the Hebrew prophets put forth a conception of religion which appears to be as wonderful an inspiration of genius as the art of Phidias or the science of Aristotle...

...Huxley himself practiced what he preached...

...Among his services to education, in addition to the introduction and enlargement of the place of science in the curriculum, is his insistence that children should devote a large part of their time to the study of English literature "and, what is still more important and still more neglected, the habit of using that language with precision, with force, and with art...

...Bibby is not aware either that Lenin is simply repeating in other words the charge that had been leveled by Friedrich Engels, I believe, that agnosticism (the name Huxley gave to his philosophy, because he thought that men's beliefs ought to be properly labeled) was merely "shamefaced materialism...

...and, as matters now stand, it is hardly rash to anticipate that, in another twenty years, the new generation . . . will be in danger of accepting the main doctrines of the Origin of Species, with as little reflection, and it may be with as little justification, as so many of our contemporaries, twenty years ago, rejected them...

...We must realize that Huxley was as much opposed to cant as Samuel Johnson...

...But even if they were right in calling him a shamefaced materialist, one might still hold that there is a world of difference between a shameless materialism and one that is human and sophisticated enough to feel in need of covering by a "fig leaf...

...and it is doubt of the new that keeps invention within bounds...

...Posthumous fame is not particularly attractive to me,' he told the old Chartist George Howell, 'but if I am to be remembered at all, I would rather it should be as "a man who did his best to help the people" than by any other title.' " But though this sounds very much as if Bibby reverences his hero, he does not always respect some of the ideas which are basic to Huxley's philosophy: "Lenin was right when he remarked 'Huxley's philosophy is as much a mixture of Hume and Berkeley as is Mach's philosophy...

...That he should never have "seriously considered" it I quite believe, because Bibby himself quotes Huxley's damaging assertion "that if forced to decide between absolute materialism and absolute idealism, he would choose the latter...

...Huxley, on the other hand, was, according to his own word, a plebeian by birth and entirely self-educated...

...What he had in mind perhaps is indicated in his statement: "History warns us . . . that it is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as superstitions...

...But in Huxley's case the Berkeleian streaks are incidental, and agnosticism serves as a fig leaf for materialism.' " Bibby does not seem to consider sufficiently how damaging Lenin's evaluation, if it were correct, would be to Huxley's intellectual character, since it would make the man H. L. Mencken once called "perhaps the greatest virtuoso of plain English who has ever lived" something of an intellectual hypocrite...

...These four subjects he wished to make "the common foundation of all education...

...One of the less satisfactory aspects of Bibby's book is his casual treatment of the intellectual relationship of Huxley to his great antagonist, Matthew Arnold...

...In granting so much, Arnold was, of course, in spite of his reservations, granting Huxley the essentials of his argument, for it was Huxley's suggestion that the new quadrivium which was to serve as the basis of all education should consist of English literature (not then an academically respectable subject), history, political economy and natural science...

...But this deterministic contrast drawn by Bibby leaves out one important fact, and that is that both Arnold and Huxley became, in time, not only very cultivated men, but in some measure wise men as well, and therefore capable, whatever the differences that separated them, of learning from each other...

...This has a tone similar to Johnson's "Words are the daughters of earth, things are the sons of heaven," which a writer recently has compared to the younger Oliver Wendell Holmes' statement: "We must think things, not words...

...Reviewed by Milton Hindus Author, "The Crippled Giant," "The Proustian Vision" THE SUBTITLE of this book is clearly a misnomer: The science of Huxley is treated in minimal fashion: he clearly was not a humanist in any strict or acceptable sense (what he was, obviously, was a humanitarian ) : the only term that is left and that stands up under critical scrutiny is the term educator...

...And the main tendency of Huxley's attack has blinded many people to the fact that he found the cant he abhorred not only among the defenders of religious orthodoxy...

...There is the Huxley who could write the following passage in his Essays: "In the 8th century B.C...

...Understanding this self-limitation on Huxley's part we begin to see various actions and sayings of his as something different from willful and wanton self-contradiction...

...I would do it myself only I think I am already sufficiently isolated and unpopular...

...And what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God.' " This is certainly not Huxley the legendary fire-eater, free-thinker, infidel, terror to the faithful, and I am not suggesting that there is not much in Huxley that justifies this popular image of him, but it is salutary to direct one's attention occasionally to the neglected side of a man who was more balanced and temperate than he is commonly credited with being...

...Arnold certainly does not deserve to stand lower in the esteem of posterity than Huxley does, and it is not the smallest tribute paid to the latter that Arnold in his Cambridge address, Literature and Science, indicated how much in common they had in their ideas as to what the curriculum should contain: "Professor Huxley . . . means to make me say, that knowing the best which has been thought and said by modern nations is knowing their belles lettres and no more...

...Bibby shows himself properly worried about this aspect of Huxley's thought (which might indeed be regarded as its foundation-stone), and in the last part of the book he offers his own hypothesis that Huxley was very nearly a dialectical materialist without knowing it, since he may never have heard of, or "seriously considered," that form of intellectual obscurantism...

...Almost everything was there from early days—the luminous intelligence, the restless inquiry, the indefatigable industry, the courage and pertinacity, the wide interests, the toughness and the tenderness— and he had to play all his parts at once...

...There is the Huxley, for example, who complacently allowed his wife to take their children to church...

...As for his eminent descendants (Nietzsche once called children a man's confessions), they have excelled in both science and in literature, and it is entirely fitting that forewords to this biography of their famous ancestor should have been contributed both by Sir Julian Huxley and by Aldous Huxley...

...I wonder if you are going to take the line of showing up the superstitions of men of science," Huxley once said to Charles Kingsley before a lecture, and went on to say, "Their name is legion and the exploit would be a telling one...

...Not far from the invention of fire we must rank the invention of doubt...

...For it is out of doubt of the old that the new springs...

...He is almost the type-specimen of Plekhanov's 'great man'—he whose personal idiosyncracies give individual features to historical events, but who above all is great because he possesses qualities which express almost perfectly the social needs of his time and enable him to serve his fellows best by being quintessentially himself...

...A good deal of the interest of the book stems, too, from the quality of enthusiasm in the author, which finds no more forceful expression than in its conclusion: "There are some men whose deyeloping qualities express themselves in a sequence of parts played at successive stages of their lives . . . but the great Professor Huxley was simply young Tom writ large...

...Rather simple-mindedly, I am afraid, he ascribes Arnold's views to his birth and education in the most privileged position in society, which caused him to cast "lingering glances over his shoulder to the halcyon days when the worthiest aristocracy in the world had set a high example of thought and behavior...

...Though Huxley struggled for the triumph of modern science and is imperishably associated with that triumph, he was also extraordinarily prescient and sensitive to the problems which might follow: "Unless we are led to see that we are citizens and men before anything else, I say it will go very badly indeed with men of science in future generations, and they will run the risk of becoming scientific pedants when they should be men, philosophers, and good citizens...

...It is well known that Huxley insisted that atheism on purely philosophical grounds is untenable, and this assertion is as important to an understanding of him as the quite similar rejection of atheism is in the case of the Buddha, whom Huxley admired and who rebuked one of his overzealous disciples for drawing that kind of a conclusion from his teachings...

...Thomas Henry Huxley was an educator of incalculable influence, and because Cyril Bibby, an English educator, has centered his attention on this aspect of his subject's career, he has written a very interesting book...

...By knowing modern nations, I mean not merely knowing their belles lettres...

...but knowing also what has been done by such men as Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Darwin...

...He might have also quoted, as he unfortunately does not, a passage in which Huxley rejects the accusation of materialism made against him by saying: "Legitimate materialism, that is, the extension of the conceptions and of the methods of physical science to the highest as well as the lowest phenomena of vitality, is neither more nor less than a sort of shorthand idealism...

...The exemplar of human nature Huxley set before himself and others was no radical agitator but Socrates, whom he called "the first agnostic, the man who, so far as records go, was the first to see that clear knowledge of what one does not know is just as important as knowing what one does know...

...There is the Huxley who permitted his influence (at a time when his prestige was great indeed) to be felt on the side of permitting the Bible to be part of the elementary schooling of London children, asking rhetorically: "By the study of what other book could children be so much humanized...