PROFESSOR HUXLEY ON MATERIALISM.
WE gave Professor Huxley a promise eleven weeks ago that we would, on the publication of his Edinburgh Sunday evening lecture of the 8th November, let our readers know in what respects we had misrepresented him by trusting the very imperfect report of that lecture which appeared in the Scotsman. That lecture has now been published by Professor Huxley in the Fortnightly Review for February, and we hasten to redeem our promise. After a careful study of this striking and lucid paper,— lucid at least so far as Professor Huxley's own province goes,—we are reduced to the humiliating confession that precisely those statements of his which seemed to us so incredible that we rejected the report as spurious, were really made by him ; while that which we ventured to think probably authentic was calculated to misrepresent his real meaning,—so that we have blundered doubly by throwing doubt on what he did say as simply incredible, and by accepting as credible something decidedly divergent in drift from his real meaning. Evidently the triumphs of our modern parliamentary reporting would not be thought quite so great as they are if honourable members debated much on ' protoplasm' as the basis of physical life, and on the logic of necessity. First, then, Professor Huxley does appear to have said what we declined to believe that he could have said,— that any one who believes in a law of necessary causality at all (at least if he believes that it is discoverable) should be a materialist, i.e., should believe that the physical antecedents of mental phenomena are their complete and sufficient causes. If Professor Huxley did not mean this, we completely fail to grasp the drift of the remarkable argument ending with the sentence, " Facts I know, and Law I know, but what is this Necessity save an empty shadow of my own mind's throwing ?" We believe that we describe truly the drift of that passage as to this effect,—that, just as the fusion of hydrogen and oxygen gives rise to a fluid called water, which has many very different properties from its chemical constituents (as, for example, that of becoming a brittle solid at 32° Fahr., which hydrogen and oxygen, though placed in proximity, will not do),—and as again, vegetable tissue has many very different properties from the carbonic acid, ammonia, and water, into which it is chemically analyzed, so at every new stage in the growing complexity of organic life, right up to those highest phenomena of nervous force to which we usually give a spiritual nomenclature, we have a right, if we can have a right at all, to refer back the new phenomena to those which had preceded it in the lower stage of being,—to assert, for instance, let us say, for the sake of example,
that that quality of water by which it satisfies thirst must be referable to the qualities of the hydrogen and oxygen of which it is composed. But, as we understand Professor Huxley, we never really can have a right to do this at all. He believes with Hume that we know nothing of necessary causation, only of uniform succession, and that when we import a " must " into the relation between cause and effect, we import nothing but " an empty shadow of our own mind's throwing." He really did press on his Edinburgh audience that the highest mental phenomena of the universe are either, in a scientific sense, the ultimate effects of the lowest physical phenomena,—or that if they be not, it is only because there is no such thing as necessity in the sequences of nature, nothing but invariable succession, and that we are frightening ourselves with phantoms of our own raising, when we talk of a " must" which Professor Huxley, in the name of physical science, utterly repudiates and "anathematizes as an intruder."
We must say we read this explanation with great amazement. Though we are quite willing to admit with Professor Huxley that Hume was " the most acute thinker " of the age which produced Kant,—not by any means the highest praise, we should have said, —we did believe that the physical philosophy of our time was bringing this substantial benefit to the world, that it was acting as a counterfoil to the unreal attempt of the followers of Hume, —most eminent among them Mr. J. S. Mill,—to get rid of the superstition, as they call it, as to the nexus between cause and effect, and bringing back the world to genuine belief in cause, if only under the aspect of physical force. Professor Tyndall, unless we very much mistake him, certainly does believe that the force which the combustion of a given amount of coal gives out, is identical with the force exerted by the expansion of the water in the boiler into steam, in a very different sense indeed from being merely, under certain given conditions, its uniform antecedent. Hume's philosophy, if it means anything, accuses the human mind of having invented a great class of words (namely, must," necessity,' causative," efficient,' &c.) to represent a class of things as purely imaginary as dryads or fauns,—and this, though the words in question are derived from its own most intimate experience. As far as we can see, there would have been no more want of this set of words in language at all, than there would be for words to denote the phenomena of vision in a planet inhabited solely by men without eyes or optic nerves, if their only origin were traceable to a desire to mark absolute uniformity of succession. Thinkers of this school tell us that this imaginary " must " arises out of that wilful tendency in the human mind to see through a millstone, which demands a cause for the phenomenon of invariable succession itself. But if there be no such thing as cause at all in human experience, how could we want to find one for this or any other phenomenon? We may exaggerate, and confuse our experiences, but surely we could not invent a new sort of phenomenon. Even if it be but " a shadow of our own mind's throwing," surely the shadow copies and imitates some shape more real than itself, to which these philosophers should refer us. Hume and Mill have never explained why the attempt to emphasize and, as it were, exaggerate the invariability of succession, should lead to the only really original conception, the only conception, that is, without any basis in experience, which they have ever conceded to the human mind,—this single essay in human originality, however, turning out unfortunately only to consist in the unwarrantable discovery of a completely new universe of error. We did believe that the reality of our great physicists' grasp of the meaning of physical force tended to break the charm of Hume's and Mill's juggling with the nature of necessity, their elaborate attempts to spirit away one of the most authentic elements of human experience.
We would submit to Professor Huxley that there is a third (and, as we believe, a much more reasonable) view than either of the alternatives lie offers us. We may not be disposed to deny with Hume all reality to the relation between cause and effect other than that which is involved in invariable sequence, nor yet to identify all the higher developments of life with the causea visible in the lower physical stages out of which they are evolved. Is it not in the highest degree reasonable, when we see that water is so different from its constituents hydrogen and oxygen, to assume that the electric spark (say) which causes what we call their chemical combination, does bring some entirely new constitutive force, which disappears again without giving us, in our present stage of knowledge, notice of its vanishing, on their decomposition? Is it not highly reasonable to suppose that in that force which fuses and holds them together is to be found the secret of the difference between the properties of the separate hydrogen and oxygen and of the water into which they combine ?
Is it not perfectly rational to assume that the vegetable tissue differs from the carbonic acid, the salts, the ammonia, and water into which it is chemically analyzed by the presence of some new force, again, which our analysis as yet fails to detect ? And so when we rise to the mental phenomena of the higher animal organizations, what excuse can there be for either simply identifying them, on the one hand, with those of the contractile cellular tissue, — the protoplasm, as Professor Huxley calls it,—which is at the physical basis of this higher life,—or, on the other hand, for wholly ignoring the nexus of cause and effect by which we rise to it ? Is it not the natural and jester view to hold that wherever we get as entirely new set of properties, we have got hold of a real addition to the store of forces or causes at work, however gradual and delicately shaded off the intermediate phases may be ? Professor Huxley himself tells us that chemical combination, though it introduces no change in the weight (i.e, the mechanical equivalence) of the combined elements as compared with the uncombined, introduces a great change in other properties. Why should we not call that change true creation? And if we do, why should we ignore the residuum of merely continued existence of that matter or force to which the new properties are added ? So of vegetable tissue. Professor Huxley tells us that that residuum consists of ammonia, and water, and carbonic acid, and some other salts ; but that all of them are " transubstantiated " by some mysterious power in the vegetable which we do not understand into vegetable tissue, and that though we can analyze the tissues back into their constituents, we cannot recombine the inorganic constituents into the vegetable tissue. Well, why is not the transubstantiating' power to be reckoned-in as a real addition out of the whole store of creative forces to those which are alone at work in the antecedent chemical phenomena? Why does Professor Huxley bid us either refer the effect back to only part of its cause, or else explode cause altogether and ignore everything but uniform succession ? And so again of the last stage. Why, when what we call mental phenomena follow the development of the animal nervous system, are we to ignore the wonderful new store of resources exhibited, and take our choice between the obvious falsehood of either identifying them with causes which are wanting in their most striking capabilities, or dissolving capriciously the tie of cause and effect altogether, and treating them as if they were only related to the previous physical conditions as one instant of time is related to its successok ? Professor Huxley tells us that while the vegetable can feed on inorganic matter, in certain forms, if it contain ammonia, animals cannot live except on either animal or vegetable organic tissue, already formed for them, and which must die before they can be assimilated ; and, again, that mental acts depend on nervous tissue, which must die in order to feed the operations of the mind. Is it not clear that if we have here a series of steps, each essential to the succeeding step, but each losing its own proper constitution,—its own modicum of life, —before the next step can be taken, it is impossible to say truly either that the second step is the effect of the first, and the third of the second, or that there is no necessary tie, nothing but an invariable sequence, between them ? The second step really rests upon the first, but is a clear addition to it of new power, — so of the third in relation to the second. Why are we to take our choice between saying that they invariably follow each other,—which is true, but not all we know,—or that the first step is the cause of the whole flight, which is apparently contrary to what we know ? Surely the reasonable state of mind is to admit that so far as we can reach the forces at work at all, the forces of each stage are needed and used in the subsequent stage, but are needed and used by some higher kind of force which is then first introduced ; the reasonable assumption being that the new forces emanate from the same creative store-house of resources as the old, indicating, however, their intellectual architecture by the ascending scale of the purposes answered in the structure?
But we must turn to the point on which we were too credulous, as to the report of Professor Huxley's lecture from those on which we were too incredulous. We assumed that he had been truly reported in saying that " to investigate in the province of what was commonly called matter was true science, while investigation into the province of what was commonly called spirit, did not help men, but left them where they were." Professor Huxley does seem to have " endorsed" the following bit of advice from Hume :—" If we take in hand any volume of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance, let us ask, does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number' ? No. ' Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it, then, to the flames, for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion." What the bit of advice meant, and what Professor Huxley meant by endorsing it, we are unable to say ; but we do not much wonder at the mistake of the reporter in considering that this endorsement, coupled with the further dictum that, " with a view to the progress of science, the materialistic terminology is in every way to be preferred " to the spiritual, since the former " connects thought with the other phenomena of the universe," and the latter is " utterly barren, and leads to nothing but obscurity and confusion of ideas," was meant to discourage all investigation into the province of " what is commonly called spirit." It is evident Professor Huxley did not mean this. He asserts that "our volition counts for something as a condition of the course of events," and that " the plain duty of each and all" is to make the little corner of the earth we can influence " somewhat less miserable and somewhat less ignorant than it was before ;" so that it is, we suppose, clear that he would have us pursue all investigations which are likely to teach us what our volitions should be,—what they ought to " count for." But how he can suppose that investigations are to be pursued without setting Hume's silly canon at defiance, and using even "spiritualistic terminology," is one'of those difficulties which so often worry us when we find a great physical philosopher moving off his own ground. We must say we think that our ethical and spiritual teachers are, on the whole, far more teachable by the great physicists, or else much more generally reasonable, than the physicists are on their side. Would not Hume's canon, for instance, require us, to take signal instances, to burn St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans, Plato's Gorgias, most of St. Augustine's Confessions, unless considered as a mere work of biographical art, most of Luther's writings, most of Feuelon's writings, and so on? to burn, in a word, all the ethical essays that are not built up on an inductionof mere examples, ",experimental reasoning concerning matter-of-fact and existence,"—and all the religious speculation and faith which is not based on so-called historical evidence of past and present facts. Hume apparently meant, if he had any clear meaning, as he usually had, to condemn all trains of moral or religious reasoning not founded on an induction of facts ; and Professor Huxley says he endorses that recommendation, while admitting that our volitions count for so much " as a condition of the course of events," that the regulation of our volitions is clearly one of the most momentous of topics. Would he endeavour to lay down rules for the regulation of those volitions drawn from mere investigations into what he calls " the order of nature," excluding the " utterly barren " spiritualistic " terminology," which includes such phraseology as human " affections," or love of that " Unknown and Unknowable " whom most of us believe that we know under the name of God ? We do not believe that Professor Huxley would. But we do assert that directly Professor Huxley quits the ground on which he wins such brilliant laurels, he becomes more difficult to understand and more easy to misunderstand than the dullest of us mere newspaper scribes. And we think t hat till Professor Huxley has time to explain somewhat more fully what topics eagerly discussed among men he wishes to consign to the region of " lunar politics," he was unwise to use language at once vagae and sweeping which seems inconsistent with other language used by him, and is hi any case not likely to conduce to make the little corner of earth which he can influence,—a good biggish one, by the way, as things go,— " less miserable and less ignorant than it was before."
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