12) Thomas Huxley, the ‘Church Scientific’ and the critique of eugenics
This is the latest entry in my ‘Spiritual Eugenics’ project, which explores the overlap between New Age spirituality and eugenics. For a definition of these terms, an introduction to the project, and more articles from it, go here.
In the next three articles, we’re going to meet the most important family for this topic — the Huxleys. No one did more to take the idea of spiritual eugenics from the Modernist New Age and inject it into the heart of the Californian counter-culture than Aldous Huxley. As we’ll see, he was inspired by his brother, Julian Huxley, the leading eugenicist of his generation. But first we’re going to meet their illustrious grand-father, Thomas Henry Huxley, to discover how he put forward evolutionary science as an alternative to Christianity, and why, despite this, he was a fervent critic of eugenics.
Thomas Henry Huxley
Thomas Henry Huxley, or Hal, was born in 1825. Britain at that time was a semi-feudalist network of nepotism. From aristocratic titles to seats in parliament to the top positions in Oxbridge, the Church and the civil service — every position was secured through inheritance or family connections. This was considered entirely right and proper.
The Anglican Church was perhaps the most powerful institution in the country. Fifty percent of the country attended its services every Sunday, its coffers overflowed with donations, and it had a wide network of influence and patronage. Only Anglicans could go to Oxford and Cambridge, where most dons were clergymen, and a considerable proportion of undergraduates were training to become Anglican priests. Only Anglicans could be civil servants and, until 1828, only Anglicans could be MPs. Your fate in this society depended on your family name, your property, your connections, and your loyalty to the 39 articles of the Anglican Church.
Hal had none of these. He was born above a butcher’s shop in Ealing. His father was an impoverished schoolteacher. He grew up in Coventry, surrounded by middle-class dissenters cursing the Tory-Anglican-gentry closed shop, or ‘Old Corruption’ as it was called by its enemies. Hal dropped out of school at 12, but pushed himself forward through his own efforts, reading voraciously and teaching himself German, Italian, Latin, and Greek. In 1841, he enrolled at Sydenham College to study medicine.
On a whim, he entered the Worshipful Company of Apothocaries’ yearly exam prize. He sat the exam and scribbled for eight hours straight. He came second, and won a medal. That enabled him to win a scholarship to Charing Cross medical school, where he studied alongside the sons of the gentry.
When he was 20, he reached for the next rung on the ladder of success, attempting to win a position as a physician and naturalist in the Royal Navy. He wrote to the Navy’s Physician General, Sir William Burnett:
Having a great desire to enter the Medical Department of Her Majesty’s Naval Service and being at the same time totally unprovided with any friendly influence by which the attainment of my object might be accelerated — I take the liberty of addressing myself directly to you as the Head of the Department.
Impressed by this young man of talent and drive, Sir William secured Hal a position as Assistant Surgeon on board the HMS Rattlesnake, which set sail in 1846 on a exploring expedition to Australia, Tasmania and New Guinea. The Navy was a useful place for a young naturalist to do research — it was Charles Darwin’s journey to the Galapagos on the HMS Beagle that enabled him to discover the origin of species.
In 1847, the Rattlesnake landed in Sydney, where Hal met an émigré English girl, Henrietta Ann Heathorn, and soon proposed to her. She accepted, but he was then separated from his fiancé for eight torturous years, because scientists made so little money, he couldn’t afford to marry and support her.
Science was not then a profession, more a hobby for wealthy gentlemen of leisure, like Charles Darwin, who could fund their own research. The word ‘scientist’ was only coined in 1833. ‘To attempt to live by any scientific pursuit is a farce’, Hal wrote to his fiancé, Nettie. ‘A man of science may earn great distinction — great reputation — but not bread. He will get invitations to all sorts of dinners and conversaziones, but not enough income to pay his cab hire.’ He fumed to himself: ‘A man who chooses a life of science chooses not a life of poverty but, so far as I can see a life of nothing’.
But Victorian society was rapidly changing. The new gospel of what would later be called ‘meritocracy’ was in the ascendant, evident in the civil service exams introduced in 1854. According to the new thinking, jobs should go to the most talented candidates, regardless of their connections. Industries were being professionalized, and a new breed of technocrats was rising to power. Huxley was one of this new breed, seeking advancement through his own efforts. ‘I am under no one’s patronage’, he wrote, ‘nor do I ever mean to be.’
His prodigious talents as a lecturer and writer quickly won him work. In 1854, he secured a permanent position as Lecturer on General Natural History at the Government School of Mines in Jermyn Street. Other positions rapidly followed. His biographer, Adrian Desmond, notes: ‘He began accumulating posts like a clergyman collecting livings.’ He published scientific papers, text books and essays, and also earned money writing columns and reviews for magazines.
He was the greatest writer of all the Huxleys, Aldous included, and arguably one of the greatest essayists England has produced. ‘No English writer, alive or dead, could ever put his points better’ wrote Leslie Stephen, the author, and father of Virginia Woolf. Hal taught himself to be a captivating public speaker, his evening lectures attracting thousands, including both working men and the gentry. One London cabby refused to take his fare: ‘Oh no, Professor. I have had too much pleasure and profit from hearing you lecture to take any money from your pocket — proud to have driven you sir.’ He was a hero of the working class — their Huxley, a proud plebeian.
Darwin’s bulldog
In 1859, Hal read Darwin’s Origin of Species. It was a religious epiphany. He described the impact as like ‘the flash of light which, to a man who has lost himself on a dark night, suddenly reveals a road which, whether it takes him straight home or not, certainly goes his way’. He was, he told Darwin, ‘willing to go to the stake’ for this theory. He would be St Paul to Darwin’s Jesus, or ‘My Good and KIND agent for the propagation of the Gospel, ie the Devil’s gospel’, as Darwin joked.
Hal readily offered his pugilistic services to the more retiring Darwin:
As to the curs which will bark and yelp, you must recollect that some of your friends, at any rate, are endowed with an amount of combativeness which (though you have often and justly rebuked it) may stand you in good stead. I am sharpening up my claws and beak in readiness.
Hal and his allies were extremely well organized. In 1864, a group of his friends formed ‘the X-Club’, to support ‘devotion to science, pure and free, untrammeled by religious dogmas’. Its members included several of the leading scientists of the day — the botanist Joseph Hooker, the physicist John Tyndall, the social scientist Herbert Spencer, and their ‘General’, Thomas Huxley.
Like a Roman phalanx, the X-Club defended the cause of Darwinism and scientific naturalism (i.e the belief that God and other supernatural entities did not exist or at least did not intervene in the natural world). The members also used their influence to support each other’s work, and win the top jobs for themselves and their allies. It was a new guild, a new priesthood.
Huxley launched the campaign in defence of the Origin with a review in The Westminster, a liberal magazine. Science was at war, he declared, if not with religion, certainly with theology and priest-craft. And it would win. ‘Extinguished theologians lie about the cradle of every science as the strangled snakes besides that of Hercules’.
Perhaps the most famous incident in the dispute over the Origin was the Oxford debate, which took place on the 30th June 1860 at the newly-opened Oxford Museum of Natural History. The occasion was the presentation of a paper about Darwin by a visiting American speaker. But it was the subsequent debate between Hal and Bishop Samuel Wilberforce that became legendary. The Bishop supposedly asked Huxley if he was descended from an ape on his mother or his father’s side. This was a low blow, implying first a connection between Darwinians and bestiality (still a common accusation among American evangelicals), and secondly, taking a sly dig at Huxley’s humble origins. Hal supposedly whispered: ‘The Lord hath delivered my enemy into my hands’, and rose to reply with quiet anger: ‘If then the question is put to me whether I would rather have a miserable ape for a grandfather or a man highly endowed by nature and possessed of great means of influence who yet employs these faculties and that influence for the purpose of introducing ridicule into a grave scientific discussion, I unhesitatingly affirm my preference for the ape.’
Bishop Wilberforce (left) versus Thomas Huxley
According to the legend, the house erupted in cheers and uproar, and the debate was declared a resounding victory for the heroic Darwinians and a defeat for tyrannous theology. The hall still bears Huxley’s name in commemoration of his triumph. In fact, the legend may not be entirely accurate. In some first-hand accounts of the debate, there is no mention of Hal’s remarks or even his presence. His ally Joseph Hooker said his speech was inaudible. But it was Hal’s version of the evening that passed into history — the victors get to define the past, and there is no doubt that, in the long-term, Huxley and his fellow Darwinians triumphed. Owen Chadwick, historian of the Victorian church, writes:
Doubt was growing before 1860 in the Victorian soul. But until that year, it scarcely touched the national life, the assumptions of legislators, the convictions of moralists.
Hal made religious doubt permissible, even admirable.
Science as a new religion
Hal was not merely a destroyer of established beliefs. He was attempting to construct a new belief-system, even a new religion. In 1851 he wrote to his then-fiancé, Nettie, who was a Christian and worried about his beliefs:
That a new belief — through which the faith and practice of men shall once more work — is possible and will exist — I cannot doubt.
He was not so much a scientist, in the sense of a toiling laboratory investigator, as a fire-brand Puritan prophet. His grandson Julian wrote that Thomas was ‘a man deeply and essentially religious by nature’. Hal himself reflected: ‘Beneath the cooled logical upper strata of my microcosm, there is a fused mass of prophetism and mysticism.’
In his first lecture at the Working-Men’s College in Red Lion Square, in 1855, he railed against ‘this idolatrous age’ which ‘listens to the voice of the living God thundering from the Sinai of science, and straightaway forgets all that it has heard, to grovel in its own superstitions; to worship the golden calf of tradition…to sacrifice its children to its theological Baal’.
That is vintage Thomas Huxley, performing a moral jujitsu against Christianity, so that Science becomes the bastion of virtue while Religion becomes immoral superstition. Blind faith, he said, is ‘the one unpardonable sin’.
Science, Hal suggested (at least in the 1850s and 60s) could become a substitute for Christianity. He wrote:
I want the working class to understand that Science and her ways are great facts for them — that physical virtue [ie sexual self-control] is the base of all other, and that they are to be clean and temperate and all the rest — not because fellows in black and white ties tell them so, but because there are plain and patent laws which they must obey ‘under penalties.’
He is gesturing towards the dismal economy of Reverend Malthus here — if the working classes have too many children, then according to Malthusian economics the ‘penalty’ will be poverty, hardship, crime, plague and death. The more we study nature, Huxley insisted, the more we will succeed at the game of life:
The chess board is the world, the pieces the phenomena of the universe, the rules of the game are what we call the laws of nature. The player on the other side is hidden from us. All we know is that his play is always fair, just and patient.
But who are we playing against? God, Death, the Devil? No, across from us sits Nature, ‘a calm, strong angel who is playing for love as we say, and would rather lose than win’. This is a far cry from Darwin’s blind and pitiless nature.
Huxley was perhaps the greatest religious preacher of the Victorian age. ‘I will make people see what grandeur there is…in Biological Science’, he declared. He gave ‘lay sermons’, including one at St Martin’s Hall in Covent Garden in January 1866, which was ‘packed to suffocation’. ‘Every part of the great Hall was crowded — every foot of standing room was occupied.’ As he walked in, Haydn’s Creation pumped out of the organ.
He guided his rapt audience ‘through a new country like a skillful charioteer’ said The Leader, and showed them ‘magnificent views of the broad and fertile kingdom of Natural Knowledge’. Karl Marx’s daughter Jenny, sitting in the audience, exulted in the ‘genuinely progressive’ sermon at a time ‘when the flock are supposed to be grazing in the house of the Lord’.
So attractive and magnetic was the gospel he preached, that people converted to what Hal called ‘the Church Scientific’ in their thousands, including many priests. One priest followed Huxley’s lecture-tour like a groupie, having memorized his lecture ‘On the Physical Basis of Life’ as if it were a catechism. One rather poignant letter to Hal from another lapsed vicar declared that he had lost his faith, left the church, and ‘what I want is some work as secretary or manager of some sort…Can you offer me such a position?’ The Spectator magazine christened him ‘Pope Huxley’. Yet although Huxley set up Science as a new religion, it was not equally open to all comers. The public could come to public lectures and wonder at science, certainly, but only highly-qualified professional scientists could become the new priests (and only men could become professional scientists).
The varieties of Darwinism
Huxley, in his more bellicose moods, insisted that Science was at war with the Christian churches. The ‘future of our civilization…depends on the result of the contest between Science and Ecclesiasticism which is now afoot’. On another occasion he wrote:
Theology & Parsondom [ie priests]…are in my mind the natural & irreconcilable enemies of Science. Few see it but I believe we are on the Eve of a new Reformation and if I have a wish to live thirty years, it is that I may see the foot of Science on the necks of her Enemies. But the new religion will not be a worship of the intellect alone.
And yet, although the metaphor of a war between Science and Religion has prospered into our own day, it is (as several historians have noted) overly simplistic. It is more accurate to say that Thomas Huxley’s ‘new reformation’ led, like the first Reformation, to a Cambrian explosion of many new religions and philosophies, both secular and theistic, competing and sometimes cross-fertilizing with each other.
Darwinism, after all, raised as many questions as it solved. Where did consciousness come from? What is the relationship between mind and brain? Do humans have free will or are we physical automata? What ethical, political or religious conclusions — if any — can we draw from scientific data or evolutionary theory? Does anything of consciousness survive after death?
Darwinists had many different responses to these questions. Evolution became for 19th and 20th century thinkers what the Bible was for thinkers in the Middle Ages — a transcendent authority that all appealed to, and everyone interpreted differently.
There were Christian Darwinists, atheist Darwinists, Spiritualist Darwinists, free market capitalist Darwinists, anarchist Darwinists, communist Darwinists, nationalist Darwinists, globalist Darwinists, racist Darwinists, anti-racist Darwinists, animal rights Darwinists — and they all insisted Darwin’s biological theory proved their particular moral philosophy. Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton, as we’ve seen, set up eugenics as a new creed, a new religion. But there were just as many varieties of eugenics — Christian, New Age, feminist, ecological, racist, inter-racial, Marxist, fascist, and so on.
What exactly was Thomas Huxley’s creed of science-as-religion? He put forward many different positions throughout his career, depending on his audience. In the 1880s, near the end of his life, he claimed to have invented the word ‘agnostic’ to define his own beliefs, or lack of them. He told his friend the Reverend Charles Kingsley: ‘I neither deny nor affirm the immortality of man.’
Was he a materialist? He often denied it, suggesting ‘materialism and spiritualism are opposite poles of the same absurdity’. Yet on other occasions, he insisted that all consciousness is reducible to material processes, and humans are, like every other animal, mechanical automata — if we have consciousness, it is ‘as completely without any power of modifying [our bodies and the material world] as the steam-whistle which accompanies the work of a locomotive engine is without influence upon its machinery’.
This is a theory known as ‘epiphenomenalism’ — if consciousness exists, it is the helpless spectator of automatic processes. The only sort of free will we have is when our automatic impulses are not blocked by circumstances — the freedom of a wind-up toy to march forward, when not blocked by a wall.
If we have no moral choice, no capacity to choose our direction in life, can we really be blamed for our actions? There were atheists and nihilists in the late 19th century who suggested not, and Darwinism was criticized for encouraging decadence and immorality. But Hal was scrupulously respectable, even Puritan when it came to sex. He wanted to show that you could be an agnostic, and still a good, Victorian pater familias. He insisted: ‘Freethinking does not mean free love’, and when his daughter brought Oscar Wilde over for dinner, he said afterwards ‘that man never enters my house again’.
The ascent of man and the hierarchy of the races
If Hal had a practical religion, it was the religion of progress, and faith in the ‘ascent of humanity’. Indeed, the famous diagram showing homo sapiens rising from ape ancestors first appeared in his 1863 book Man’s Place in Nature.
Evolution revealed humans’ ancient origins in primal sludge, but also opened the prospect of limitless development in the future. Far from being dispirited by evolutionary theory, it should give us hope. He wrote in Man’s Place in Nature:
thoughtful man, once escaped from the blinding influences of traditional prejudice, will find in the lowly stock whence Man has sprung, the best evidence of the splendor of his capacities, and will discern in his long progress through the Past, a reasonable ground of faith in his attainment of a nobler Future.
This is the beginning of the evolutionary religion which his grandsons Julian and Aldous would develop — the idea that humans could evolve into a ‘nobler future’ of superhumans.
Hal was also a passionate believer in the British Empire, and its right to conquer other countries and subjugate other ‘races’. His views on race have proven to be controversial. Indeed, as I write this, students at Western University in Washington are campaigning to remove his name from a college building. They claim that Huxley was the ‘fountainhead of scientific racism’ (to quote one historian). Is this true?
In general, questions around race are the most controversial aspect of evolutionary theories. Did all humans emerge from a single genetic origin? Are we all the same species? Are there different biological ‘races’, and if so, do they have biological differences in temperament, or intelligence, or morality? Can you measure such differences through anatomical differences, or IQ tests?
Historically, Christianity insisted on the unity of the human species — we all descended from Adam and Eve. However, starting during the Enlightenment, various thinkers, including Voltaire and David Hume, put forward a theory known as polygenism, according to which there are distinct ‘races’ which are actually different species, with different natural origins. Sometimes this polygenic theory was used to support racist classifications of ethnic groups as subhuman, soulless and incapable of feeling, therefore deserving enslavement or extermination.
Where did Darwin and Huxley stand on these questions? Their position was complicated. On the one hand, they rejected polygenism, and insisted all humans are the same species, evolved from the same primate origin. They also rejected the Christian idea that humans have a soul, which makes us radically different from primates. And they both, on a few unfortunate occasions, placed human ‘races’ in a hierarchy, suggesting their own ‘race’ was the highest while other ‘races’ were less fit.
Huxley wrote a paper for the Royal Society in 1870, called ‘On the Geographical Distribution of the Chief Modifications of Mankind’ in which he divided humans into various ‘races’, culminating in the superior ‘physical beauty and intellectual energy’ of the ‘Xanthochroi’ (by which he meant northern European whites). Like other biologists and anthropologists of his era, he was driven by an urge to measure and classify the human animal. In 1869, he wrote to the Colonial Office requesting it gather naked photos of natives from around the empire. The order went out to all governors of British colonies, who sent back photos like the one below:
In his 1863 best-seller, Man’s Place in Nature, Huxley examined fossil remains of the recently discovered Neanderthal man, and compared it on the one hand to primate skulls, and on the other to the skulls of various races, implying that some ‘lower races’ are slightly closer to Neanderthals and apes. He also thought women’s smaller brains meant they were less smart.
In an early essay he writes about the aborigines and Polynesians he encountered on his naval trip to the Antipodes. He is no fan of aborigines (they had killed some of his crew) and writes: ‘The elimination of the latter from the earth’s surface can be viewed only with satisfaction’.
As to whether Huxley was the ‘fountainhead of scientific racism’, three things can be said in his defence. First, both he and Darwin campaigned for the abolition of slavery, and against a brutal suppression of a slave revolt in Jamaica. Second, he insisted on the unity of the ‘Man Family’, unlike the most virulent racists of his time, who suggested different ‘races’ were different species. By the end of his life, he questioned if racial differences were not cultural rather than biological (his grandson Julian would do much to champion this idea). Finally, as we’ll see, Hal criticized eugenics as cruel and unscientific, in contrast to many scientific racists.
All that said, there’s no denying Thomas Huxley was a jingoistic British imperialist. Near the end of his life, in 1887, he warned that Britain was entering ‘upon the most serious struggle for existence to which this country was ever committed. The latter years of the century promise to see us in an industrial war of far more serious import than the military wars of its openings years.’ Britain was in a Darwinian struggle with Germany for imperial dominance, and its promotion of scientific research was ‘the condition of our safety from submergence by another flood of barbarous hordes’.
Thomas Huxley’s critique of eugenics
By the end of Hal’s life, the rebellious outsider had become a pillar of the establishment. He had been president of the Royal Society, the British Association for the Advancement of Science, the Royal College of Surgeons and the Geological Society, on the board of the Zoological Society and the London board of schools, Rector of Aberdeen University, founder of the Normal School of Science, on 10 royal commissions, a governor of Eton, and a member of the Privy Council. A friend nicknamed him ‘The President of Most of the Societies’.
When he visited America, near the end of his life, he looked off the side of the ship at the tug-boat pulling them into the harbor. ‘If I wasn’t a human, I should like to be a tug-boat’, he said. Perhaps more fitting would be a steam engine. He powered away with extraordinary energy for most of his life. Yet the steam engine was prone to the occasional breakdown. Mental instability ran through his family tree as much as intellectual distinction. His father had lost his mind, his brother also ended up in a psychiatric facility. Hal had occasional black moods where he struggled to resist the urge to kill himself. His daughter Marian — wife of the painter John Collier and a fine artist herself– suffered a nervous breakdown. Hal took her to be treated by pioneering neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot in Paris, but to no avail. When she died of pneumonia, aged 28, Hal said it was probably for the best.
His last great essay is ‘Evolution and Ethics’, published in 1893, two years before his death and one year before Aldous’ birth. In it, Hal recanted on his previous faith that Nature could teach us virtues. He now decided that we pursue the ethical life in opposition to the ‘cosmic struggle for existence’. We cannot draw a moral ‘ought’ from the ‘is’ of evolution:
In place of ruthless self-assertion [the ethical life] demands self-restraint; in place of thrusting aside, or treading down, all competitors, it requires that the individual shall not merely respect, but shall help his fellows; its influence is directed, not so much to the survival of the fittest, as to the fitting of as many as possible to survive. It repudiates the gladiatorial theory of existence.
Like a gardener trying to cultivate his garden, humans must work with nature, but also counter-act its destructive tendencies. In a telling metaphor, he compares human efforts to be ethical to an imperialist building a colony in a foreign land, trying to protect it against the encroachments of disease, starvation, and the resistance of the natives. With skill and perseverance, the imperialist could cultivate a new Eden. But there is still the risk his colonial subjects will breed excessively and degenerate. The imperialist might, then, fall into a temptation. Perhaps he could apply the same principles to his colony as to his garden — encourage the growth of the best specimens, and eliminate the worst.
Hal referred here to the field of ‘eugenics’, launched by Charles Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton, in 1883. As we’ve seen, eugenics was popular with many British intellectuals in the late 19th and early 20th century, including Charles Darwin. Hal, to his credit, rejected this ‘pigeon-fancier’s polity’. Firstly, he said, who could determine for sure which humans were fit? Eugenics turns the statistician into a Grand Inquisitor:
I doubt whether even the keenest judge of character, if he had before him a hundred boys and girls under fourteen, could pick out, with the least chance of success, those who should be kept, as certain to be serviceable members of the polity, and those who should be chloroformed, as equally sure to be stupid, idle, or vicious.
Second, don’t we all have our moments of mental unfitness? Hal certainly did, as did many members of his family:
I sometimes wonder whether people, who talk so freely about extirpating the unfit, ever dispassionately consider their own history. Surely, one must be very ‘fit’ indeed, not to know of an occasion, or perhaps two, in one’s life, when it would have been only too easy to qualify for a place among the ‘unfit.’
Third, as GK Chesterton later wrote, you could talk about the ‘fitness’ of a cow for human industry, judging it by how much milk or beef it produced, but who is to say how to define human fitness? Fitness for what? Assessing the value and deciding the destiny of a human being through an exam, or the even more artificial method of the IQ test, was imprecise and cruel. Finally, as Hal pointed out, it’s rather chilling to talk calmly about the sterilization or even extermination of millions for the good of the species.
Hal rejected the eugenic temptation. And yet his philosophy is not that different to Galton’s. He also put forward the idea of science as a new religion. He also believed in the possibility of humans evolving into a higher form. He was also very much a meritocrat. Your value to society is decided by your achievements. Life is an examination. He believed in the meritocratic gospel: ‘IQ + effort = merit’. Those who pass life’s tests deserve to flourish, as he did. Those who don’t, naturally fade away. There is no God to accept us, warts and all, and our only hope is the slow advance of the human race through the work of the gifted few.
This philosophy does not give much meaning to the average human. And for the gifted, it creates an intolerable pressure to succeed — their worth and fortune in life is decided very early through school exams. It created particular pressure for those, like Aldous and Julian, who were born into the intellectual aristocracy and expected to live up to their genetic destiny. As a family motto went, ‘Huxleys always get firsts.’ This pressure would lead to tragedy for the Huxleys.