The Descent of the Huxleys

We are by now familiar with the phenomenon of the “intellectual aristocracy” that has presided over English culture during the past century. An intellectual aristocracy literally — of birth as well as talent. It is altogether a curious affair, and although historians and sociologists have freely alluded to it and have even mapped out its genealogy, they have shied away from some obvious questions: Why and how does such an aristocracy persist when other aristocracies so conspicuously decline? And what, if any, is the specific character of this aristocracy — that is, the specific character of its intellectuality, apart from its general character as an aristocracy?

The questions may be too ambitious and unanswerable applied to the aristocracy as a whole. But perhaps they can be addressed to a part of it. The Huxleys, notably.

The Huxleys were, and are, right in the middle of it. They interconnect with the rest. Three of the Huxleys are uniquely interesting in themselves, and interesting as they relate to each other. One could not do better in the choice of a case study.

by Ronald W. Clark (McGraw-Hill, $8.95)

edited by Cyril Bibby (Macmillan, $7.95)

by Laura Archera Huxley (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $6.95)

It is with great expectations, therefore, that one turns to the collective biography of the family by Ronald W. Clark. Mr. Clark is intrigued by the fact that T. H. Huxley, the famous scientist and champion of Darwin, can have passed on to his great-great-grandchildren no more than one sixteenth of his genes; and yet the family singularity has been preserved. Sir Gavin de Beer, in his preface, suggests that the genetic inheritance is somewhat greater than that. But the more interesting question is qualitative rather than quantitative. Granted that the Huxleys have had a genetic inheritance making for superior intellect, did that intellect have a distinctive form? “Was there a typical intellectual stance which they adopted; were there beliefs, attitudes of mind, certain constancies, recurring regularly so that one could, in spite of human individuality, recognize a Huxley by his talk almost as surely as a man’s regiment could be recognized by his shoulder-flashes or his buttons?” The rhetoric, the metaphor, would seem to call for a negative answer. Yet Mr. Clark responds affirmatively. The Huxleys, he insists, have been intellectually, substantively distinctive. For one thing, they have shared a common set of “interests”; they have all been interested in “man and his environment, the spread of scientific knowledge, the problem of the world’s resources and how to manage them for the common good.” More important, they have shared a common set of beliefs underlying these common interests: a belief in one culture rather than two (the inseparability of art and science); and a belief that there is something in nature that cannot be entirely explicated by science.

This is a formidable heritage, whether transmitted through the genes, as is implied, or through environmental conditioning. (There has been, after all, no institutional arrangement to facilitate this transmission, no “Huxley Foundation” to perpetuate these interests and beliefs.) Or it would be formidable if true. Or if the truth were more than a truism. It is always possible to find a common denominator it one is willing to be sufficiently reductionist. The question is whether that denominator is significant. One is reminded of the old gag about the policeman who is about to arrest a demonstrator and is told, “I’m no Communist. I’m an antiCommunist,” to which the policeman blithely replies, “Communist, anti-Communist, I don’t care what kind of Communist you are.”If only Mr. Clark had cared more about what kind of intellectual each of the Huxleys was, he would have written a better book. There would have been less straining for effect, for spurious significance. (Typically: “Thus the process of evolution, which the Huxleys had always appreciated as so central to existence, was to be strangely illustrated by their own lives in three successive generations” — that is, each generation was different from the preceding one.) And there would have been fewer infelicities, even grotesqueries, of style. (“Huxley metaphorically gritted his teeth and pressed on.” Or, “In most Huxley homes there was at least one portrait of TH in his prime, looking down in benevolent regard from the walls, metaphorically saluted at sun-up and sun-down like the Union flag, the persona of a past culture still influencing the present.”)

Mr. Clark, if only he had sufficiently respected their differences, might have found a genuine and important common theme in the Huxleys — at least in the three Huxleys in whom one is most interested: TH, and his grandchildren the scientist Julian and the novelist Aldous. (The other Huxleys appear in this book as fillers, endless lists of names and accomplishments designed to make the statistical point that the Huxley genes will and do out.) But the theme is a common problem, not a common interest as he defines it, still less a common belief. What is significant is that to this problem each of the three Huxleys gave a quite different answer.

The problem is nothing less than the meaningfulness and adequacy of science in interpreting file. This problem was what TH bequeathed not only to his grandchildren but to the world at large. He also bequeathed to them an answer, or rather an attitude, a mode of address. But his answer, attitude, mode, or whatever, was precisely what they—Julian, Aldous, and most of their and our contemporaries — have rejected.

There were giants in those days, and T. H. Huxley was one of them. Self-made, self-taught, sharptongued, delighting in controversy, unawed by professors, bishops, or prime ministers, inquiring into and pronouncing judgment on science, philosophy, theology, politics, economics, or law as the occasion might arise or as he might create it, he was also kindly, humane, unaggressive in personal relations, undemagogic in rhetoric, subtle in argument, genuinely knowledgeable about those subjects he chose to controvert, and altogether more modulated and complicated than he is generally made out to be. He took it upon himself to be Darwin’s “bull-dog,” knowing that Darwin had neither the heart nor the stomach for a fight. (Literally neither heart nor stomach; the smallest exertion brought on the “neurasthenia” or whatever it was — psychologists and doctors have had a field day with it — that incapacitated him for everything except his work.) Yet even in defending Darwin, in arguing for, explicating, and popularizing his theory, Huxley never glossed over its difficulties or defects.

Mr. Bibby’s anthology, The Essence of T. H. Huxley, is too snippety, but it does succeed in revealing a side of him that one would never suspect from Mr. Clark’s book. For even at the height of the Darwinian controversy, Huxley is seen to have kept his balance. The theory of natural selection, he then wrote, was the best available one, the mostpersuasive hypothesis that had yet been offered. But it was theory and hypothesis, not truth or fact. And he recommended to his readers the state of mind characterized by Goethe as thätige skepsis, active doubt, the “doubt which so loves truth that it neither dares rest in doubting nor extinguish itself by unjustified belief.” Another twenty years, he held out the hope, might produce the evidence to establish the truth or falsity of the theory. Twenty years later, however, he had new cause for doubt. Recalling the adage that new truths begin as heresies and end as orthodoxies or even superstitions, he predicted that in still 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.”

That “new generation” was Julian Huxley’s. TH is reported to have said of the four-year-old Julian: “I like the way he looks you straight in the face and disobeys you.” But one wonders whether he would have been so indulgent of the adult Julian, who disobeyed one of TH’s main principles: “That to which I am utterly opposed is the creation of an Established Church Scientific, with a hierarchical organization and a professorial Episcopate.” For Julian is at present the undisputed archbishop of the Established Church Scientific. And if his early years were spent largely in defending the orthodox tenets of that church, his later years have been spent in building up precisely the organization and episcopacy that had been anathema to his grandfather.

But it is more than a scientific orthodoxy, more even than a scientific establishment, that Julian has proselytized for. Both have been intended as instruments for the reorganization of society, a reorganization that would make society for the first time rational and scientific. If I Were Dictator, published in 1934, was the semifacetious title of a not at all facetious book in which the structure of such a society was outlined. (An earlier visit to Russia had impressed him with the scientific rationality with which that country seemed to him to be solving its social problems.) And his Romanes Lecture on Evolutionary Ethics described the potential evolution of man to a new and higher state of species and argued for the need to “construct a mechanism” to further that evolution.

Again Julian had flouted his grandfather, who had warned against just such aspirations to power on the part of scientists and just such a perversion of the idea of evolution. TH’s Romanes Lecture on Evolution and Ethics, delivered fifty years before Julian’s, rebuked the “administrator” (he was not so bold as to call him a “dictator”) who presumed to impose upon society his “logical ideal of evolutionary regimentation.” This “pigeonfanciers polity,” TH insisted, was neither desirable nor, fortunately, possible. It was impossible because there was in man a “free-play of self-assertion, or natural liberty,” which would resist such a polity. And it was undesirable because the very idea of “evolutionary ethics” was abhorrent. Ethics was not a fulfillment of evolution; it was a denial of it.

Social progress means a checking of the cosmic process at every step and the substitution for it of another, which may be called the ethical process; the end of which is not the survival of those who may happen to be the fittest . . . but of those who are ethically the best. . . . The ethical progress of society depends, not on imitating the cosmic process, still less in running away from it, but in combating it.

Julian’s quarrel was not only with TH; it was also with his brother Aldous. If I Were Dictator was the obverse of Brave New World. Julian’s book followed Aldous’ by two years and was intended to restore the benignness of a scientifically organized society that Aldous had portrayed as thoroughly malignant. Yet the two books were opposite sides of the same coin. Aldous, as much as Julian, was science-ravished. Even more than Julian, he had been amorous of knowledge, facts, whatever passed as certain reason. Yet even while obsessed by his passion, he was nauseated by it — and nauseated by life, since sex, morality, and the human and social relations that made up life seemed dependent on, and at the same time nullified by, reason-cum-science. For a while he could tolerate life only by denying its meaningfulness, its rationality. But finally meaninglessness itself became intolerable. At that point, still seeking a meaningfulness that would be as absolute as that which he had once attributed to science, he turned to a variety of pseudoscientific techniques to do what science had conspicuously failed to do.

These pseudo-, crypto-, preter-, or supra-scientific techniques (depending on how much credibility one allows them) take up a good part of the account of Aldous’ last years written by his second wife, Laura. The title, This Timeless Moment, is from the hypnotic refrain with which Aldous soothed his first wife during her dying hours. Holding his left hand on her head and his right on her solar plexus (“between two right-handed persons this contact seems to create a kind of vital circuit”), he repeated endlessly the message directed to her subconscious: “Forget the body. . . . Go forward into the light. . . . No memories, no regrets, no looking backwards. . . . Only light. Only this pure being, this love, this joy. Above all this peace. Peace in this timeless moment, peace now, peace now.” But it was not only in extremis that Aldous used such techniques. A miracle worker, to be sure, was called for only after everything else had failed to cure his wife’s cancer. But vital circuits, subliminal messages, magnetic passes, hypnosis, automatic writing, acupuncture, clairvoyance, mediums, nature foods (his brand of vegetarianism proscribed not only the usual meat, fish, and eggs, but also all milk products), mescaline, LSD (it was LSD that his wife administered in his last hours), a variety of other drugs, and every variety of mystical creed and practice — all these were his everyday fare. Once science had abdicated, it would seem, everything was permitted.

For Nietzsche it was the death of God that meant that everything was permitted. And perhaps this is the clue to the later Huxleys as well. They were able to give credence to everything because they could give no credence to God. Julian devised an “evolutionary humanism” that promised to make of science a “religion for humanity,” a “religion without revelation.” Aldous engaged in a kind of polymorphous mysticism in his search for the “timeless moment.” TH had coined the word “agnosticism” to describe his own thätige skepsis on the subject of religion. But here again TH differed significantly from his grandsons. For if his agnosticism ruled out a positive belief in God, it also ruled out a positive belief in any substitute for God. When Herbert Spencer sought to make a substantive principle of belief out of his “Unknowable,” Huxley rebuked him. A capitalized, hypostasized Unknowable, he pointed out, was “merely the Absolute redivivus, a sort of ghost of an extinct philosophy, the name of a negation hocus-pocussed into a sham thing.” As for himself, he continued, “if I am to talk about that of which I have no knowledge at all, I prefer the good old word God, about which there is no scientific pretence.” And when others tried to do with his Agnosticism what Spencer did with the Unknowable, Huxley rebelled: “If there were a General Council of the Church Agnostic, very likely I should be condemned as a heretic. .. . On the whole the ‘bosh’ of heterodoxy is more offensive to me than that of orthodoxy, because heterodoxy professes to be guided by reason and science and orthodoxy does not,”

Thätige skepsis, in science as well as religion — this defines the difference between the generations. Having never created an absolute out of science, TH had no need to seek an absolute anywhere else. But it takes not so much a strong mind — his grandchildren assuredly had that — as a strong character to rest content in a state of “active doubt.” Content: not complacent, but not desperate either.