PROFESSOR HUXLEY'S WEAK SIDE.
PROFEPROFESSOR HUXLEY'S genius is doubtless for science ; SSOR his weakness is evidently for theology and meta- physics. He is always dashing into new controversies on these subjects, before be has concluded those in which he was already engaged. It is true that in his controversy with Mr. Lilly, the latter was the assailant. Mr. Lilly, like the disinherited knight in challenging Brian de Bois Gilbert, struck Professor Huxley's shield with the sharp end of his lance, without having received any provocation from the Professor. But it is not yet a year since Professor Huxley wrote two articles on " The Evolu- tion of Theology " which were spontaneous irruptions into a sphere not at all scientific, and irruptions made after a most unscientific fashion. And now he is. challenging Dr. Liddon, in an article contributed to the Nineteenth Century on "Scientific and Pseudo-Scientific Realism," which, we venture to think, will be as little of a feather in Professor Huxley's cap as was his little book on " Hume," in Mr. Tohn Morley's series. In the meantime, Mr. Lilly has published in the Fortnightly Review a rejoinder to Professor Huxley's reply, which perhaps he may think it better to leave unanswered, for to the greater part of it we imagine that no answer is even conceivable. We do not, indeed, recognise as at all satis- factory Mr. Lilly's explanation of his sentence that "Professor Huxley puts aside as unverifiable everything which the senses cannot verify, everything beyond the bounds of physical science, everything which cannot be brought into a laboratory and dealt with chemically." He pleads on behalf of this rather startling account of a metaphysician who thinks nothing so certain as a fact of consciousness, that Professor Huxley holds that "as surely as every future grows out of past and present, so will the physiology of the future gradually extend the realm of matter and law until it is co-extensive with knowledge, with feeling, with action." No doubt that implies that Professor Huxley looks forward to a time when we shall detect exact physical equivalents or " causes " by which to measure and account for knowledge, feeling, and action, and equivalents or causes which will be more manageable, more amenable to calculation and prediction, than knowledge, feeling, and action themselves. But it does not at all imply that Professor Huxley will regard these physical equivalents or causes as standing on the same level of certainty as the conscious im- pressions which they are to measure, and which, in scientific processes, they will represent. It is still perfectly open to him to say that where there is any question whether the supposed. physical equivalent does or does not adequately represent the ideal experience for which it stands, the ultimate appeal is to the ideal experience, and not to the physical element which stands for its material cause, and therefore for its scientific equivalent. Nor do we know that Professor Huxley has ever said anything inconsistent with this ultimate adherence of his to the idealistic point of view. Still, except on this one point, it seems to us that Mr. Lilly's answer to Professor Huxley is abso- lutely triumphant, that he has proved out of the Professor's own mouth that he does regard all the ultimate causes of the universe as material causes, causes belonging to the region of molecular physics. Professor Huxley insists, indeed, on retaining the right to throw doubt at any time upon the real existence of these physical causes manifested to us only by conscious- ness, and therefore depending absolutely on consciousness for their authentication ; but we see no advantage which that right ensures him, except the advantage of securing for himself a door of escape out of materialism into nihilism. If the state of consciousness is to be trusted, then the materialistic key to the mental universe is the true one ; if it is untrustworthy, there is no key at all. We are fully aware that Professor Huxley values this door of escape very much. He prides himself a good deal on the ultimate idealism of his metaphysical position, though in what sense it furnishes him any moral escape from materialism we cannot conceive. If any law of causation in his sense of the term be true, materialism is evidently his philosophical faith; if there be no legitimate inference possible from consciousness to an external world, then the whole world of science is an illusion, and man remains without access to truth, imprisoned in himself.
Professor Huxley's attack in the Nineteenth Century on one of Dr. Liddon's sermons at St. Paul's, betrays a preference of the same kind for a door of escape from a real difficulty which is not a door of true escape from it at all, unless, indeed, it be an escape from mental difficulty into mental paralysis. He regards with the greatest contempt the quasi-medimval realism which treats "laws of Nature" as something real in themselves, and not mere descriptions of the grooves in which Nature is observed actually to run. He levels much ridicule at the notion that there is anything in external nature corresponding to either the term "law of Nature," of which Dr. Liddon had spoken as if it had some real existence, or the term "vital force." He laughs at all who have held " species " to be anything except the name given to a number of individuals picked out because they resemble each other in various important characteristics ; and congratulates himself that very early in his career he became what would have been called in the old days a pure "Nominalist,"—that is, a complete disbeliever in any mystic essence by which the members of a species are supposed to be connected together. Well, from this we conclude that Professor Huxley regards forces and causes just as he regards laws of Nature and species. He would say that the force of gravity is a mere name for a class of phenomena representing fixed modes of motion or tendencies to motion, and that as cause represents nothing but invariable antecedent, so force represents nothing but a necessary antecedent of motion. In short, he would, we conclude, resolve all the words indicating energy, effort, struggle, tendency, and so forth, into metaphors derived from our muscular feelings, and would regard our disposition to attribute any meaning of the same kind to causes of motion which are not of human origin,—such as the causes of the movements of planets or of earthquakes,—as one of the anthropomorphic illusions of the human imagination. In other words, the dynamic conception of the universe must be in his view a totally false one ; he must hold that we have no more right to imagine " force " in any cosmical sense of the word as involving effort, where there is no reason to suppose that there is any muscular apparatus accompanied by consciousness, than we have to imagine colour in any visual sense of the word outside the eye. Well, that no doubt is an escape from the difficulty of understanding how the physical universe and human nature can have any common cause ; bat it is an escape out of one difficulty into a much greater difficulty. If there is no right in the mind of man to interpret force as existing in the universe in the same form in which he apprehends it in his own experience, can there be any right in him to interpret thought in another person as meaning that which he under. stands it to mean in his own experience ? Have you any more justification for attributing thought like your own to your neigh- bour, than you have for attributing force like your own to him ? Have you any more justification for confidence that your mathe- matical conceptions will be verified in distant worlds, than for your confidence that your physical conceptions are verified in the same worlds P If there be no real key in the mind to the con- stitution of the universe, not only is medimval realism a gigantic mistake, but the progress of science itself has been largely due to the irresistible disposition of men to make this gigantic mistake. Without the belief in force,—in the human sense,—as really manifested in the universe, would Newton have ever discovered the law of gravitation ? Without the confidence in reason as universal, and as embodied in outward as well as inward life, -would, indeed, philosophy have even been so much as possible P Realism in the Platonic and the medimval sense may be obsolete. We no more believe that there is a species " man " apart from men, than we believe that there is a species " pump " apart from all individual pumps. But that is not in any sense giving up the real existence of ideas and forces by the -common agency of which things which resemble each other in Nature, came thus to resemble each other. It is just as easy to suppose that suns or planets, or men or animals, could be what they are without the creative activity of a mind which expressed its purpose in their various organisations, as it is to suppose that a number of steam-engines could be what they are without the activity of some mind or minds which directed their mechanical construction. As it seems to us, the very principle of scientific, no less than of moral, progress is the assumption that like pheno- mena imply a like origin, and that man may safely interpret the universe by the light of his own intellectual and moral experience, if at least he takes pains enough to distinguish that of which he has ample experience from that of which he has little or none. Professor Huxley seems to us to have found in nominalism just such a door of escape from the difficulties of realism, as he found in idealism from the difficulties of materialism. It is a door of escape which leads to general scepticism, not to fruitful science. If the scientific world had all been impregnated with true nominalism, the confidence felt by man in his own intellect as the proper key with which to unlock the secrets of Nature could have never existed. Yet that is the confidence on which all pro- gress depends.
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