Every man "…of high natural ability, who is both ignorant and miserable is as great a danger to society as a rocket without a stick is to the people who fire it" (Thomas Henry Huxley, Administrative Nihilism, 1871). As Professor Desmond pointed out in the first volume of his biography (The Devil’s Disciple), the young Huxley endorsed Thomas Carlyle’s diagnosis of England’s social condition.

The enfranchisement of the urban proletariat, in 1867, convinced Carlyle that a complete bouleversement of society was imminent. For the landed aristocracy were incapable, in his judgement, of performing the guiding role allotted to them in the feudal order. And the captains of industry had but a rudimentary conception of their social responsibilities, as testified by their purblind enthusiasm for laissez-faire (vide Thomas Carlyle, Shooting Niagara: And After?, 1867).

Carlyle’s prescription for England’s ills was the beneficent rule of the "Aristocracy of Nature". On Heroes, Hero-Worship and The Heroic In History (1840), contains a taxonomy of the various types which make up this natural aristocracy. The hero is successively presented as prophet, as poet, as priest, as man of letters and as king etc. A significant omission, however, is the hero as technocrat. For the young Carlyle had been much taken by Comte’s prediction that scientists (in particular social scientists) will take over the unifying role once performed by the priests, thereby providing the new ideas to rebuild the shattered social consensus.

How apt, then, that Professor Desmond sub-titles the second volume of his biography of Huxley, Evolution’s High Priest. For Huxley was the perfect exemplar of the reformed spiritual power or secular priesthood of scientists and technicians, anticipated by Comte. His approach to governance and to social problems, like Comte’s, was essentially technocratic and non-political. Only encourage men to think rationally, he argued, and they will see that capital performs a no less essential function than labour. And that it is the interest of every class to co-operate to exploit nature’s resources. State funded education was the perfect antidote to socialism, in Huxley’s estimation.

In The Devil’s Disciple, Desmond described Huxley’s "ignominious beginning" over a butcher’s shop in Ealing, the youngest son of a impecunious schoolteacher. There is something of a parallel, then, between the careers of Huxley and that of his hero Carlyle. Both were born in obscurity. Both rose to vertiginous heights by force of intellect alone. Their lives seem to confirm the idea that history is about the deeds of preternaturally gifted individuals.

On this latter point, however, Adrian Desmond demurs. For Evolution’s High Priest, as he portentously informs us, is "a book about Class and Power". The old history of ideas, he insists, tended to displace "… the person, made him or her a disembodied ghost, a flash of transcendent genius". Desmond’s conception of history is that of Plekhanov, for whom individuals were mere corks thrown up and tossed about by contending social forces. Desmond’s avowed goal is the "embedding" of Huxley in the society to which he belonged (a not inapt simile, considering Huxley’s contributions to palaeontology).

The big idea of Evolution’s High Priest (if I have grasped it) is that Huxley was the representative of particular social forces. The conflict between evolutionary science and Anglican theology, in which he played such a prominent role, should not be taken at face value, Desmond suggests. For this conflict was an ideological reflex of a power struggle between circulating elites (to quote Pareto’s inimitable phrase).

On the one side was the traditional ruling order (the landed aristocracy and gentry) virtually monopolising the higher professions, the state and the Anglican church. On the other, the new manufacturing elements, closely associated with Dissent and therefore (wealth notwithstanding) critical of established institutions.

An identity of outlook between the Victorian industrialists and those members of the scientific community unwilling to tailor their conclusions to fit Anglican orthodoxy is perceived by Desmond (the inconvenient fact that neither Huxley nor Darwin, unlike Herbert Spencer, had direct roots in Nonconformity is brushed aside). Both groups were aggrieved that university curricula were subservient to classicism and downgraded the profession of science and "useful knowledge". Not surprisingly, the new industrial barons provided much of the money for an expansion of higher education (especially scientific education) free of Anglican influence. Desmond notes that Huxley, who had excellent contacts in the world of manufacturing, played the role of intermediary in this process.

Professor Desmond’s Huxley is an enragé (Huxley, with perhaps a tincture of Desmond). For much of his career, his was an iconoclastic creed. He was a champion of meritocracy and of what Sir Julian Huxley subsequently called "humanism on an evolutionary basis".

But as Raymond Aron wisely remarks, the "…élite that has displayed most virtuosity in the absorption of potential revolutionaries is the English élite…". In due course, Huxley also joined the establishment, in the gorgeous uniform of Privy Councillor. His appointment to numerous Royal Commissions and his membership of various educational, scientific and governmental institutions, indicates the growing dependence of the state on organised intelligence (civilisation du savoir). The social organism, perforce, was evolving (additional) higher functions. Adrian Desmond emphasises Huxley’s ambivalent attitude towards both the "Classes" and the masses. Like Herbert Spencer, he despised honours. Yet he also accepted them. (Carlyle, who was more fastidious, rejected the offer of a peerage and pension from Disraeli, though he deigned to receive a medal from the Prussian state, in recognition of his History of Frederick The Great).

The man who had sympathised with the Chartists was "pushed into conservative Unionism by Home Rule" (p.259). He wrote a series of articles in the early 1890s (On The Natural Inequality Of Men, Natural And Political Rights etc.) which aimed to disprove socialism on neo-Malthusian grounds.

Yet despite this aggiornamento, Huxley retained profound reservations about the modern order. "What profits it to the human Prometheus that he has stolen the fire of heaven to be his servant…", he demanded, "if the vulture of pauperism is eternally to tear his very vitals?". In the 1890s, Huxley sought a middle, technocratic path, which avoided both the "administrative nihilism" of Herbert Spencer and renascent socialism.

One omission in Desmond’s exegesis is his silence as to the value of Huxley’s copious writings on religion. This is somewhat puzzling, considering the importance that the writer attaches to the history/sociology of ideas. In the 1880s, Huxley was involved in a protracted dispute with Gladstone in the pages of the Nineteenth Century. This was prompted by Gladstone’s incautious claim that the Book of Genesis anticipates the theory of evolution. Huxley’s remarkable knowledge of contemporary biblical scholarship was evident throughout this controversy. Yet, as Benjamin Kidd perspicaciously observed in Social Evolution (1894), Huxley only seemed concerned with the truth or falsehood of Christian theology.

The unfailing principle by which the scientific status of any conception can be determined, for Huxley, was verifiability, a principle which the lights of science and philosophy had struggled to establish. Paradoxically, it was his unswerving devotion to Descartes’ golden rule enjoining doubt that makes Huxley’s reflections on religion of only transient interest.

For the sociology of religion, as Kidd suggested, must commence from a quite different starting point (from what Peter L. Berger recently called the "…social reality of religion"). Max Weber’s theory of the contribution of religious doctrines to the rise of capitalism subsequently showed what rich insights can then be achieved.

In Social Evolution, Kidd cleverly employed the principle of utility, beloved by so many Darwinians, to show the stultifying character of Huxley’s Agnosticism. Kidd conceded that many of the tenets of Christianity are irrational. But he put it to Huxley that these admittedly irrational beliefs are beneficial to society, that the irrational is an analogue of the instinctive.

The leitmotif of Social Evolution was the contribution of Protestantism to the development of democracy and social equality (a precursor of Weber’s Protestant ethic). Predictably, Huxley dismissed Kidd’s book as merely a footnote in the war between science and religion. Such works are an "anaesthetic which a clement Providence has administered to orthodoxy during the excision of its diseased organs", he quipped.

As William Irvine remarks, in Apes, Angels, & Victorians, Huxley’s strategy was to attack Christianity "at its weakest point", by highlighting the contortions of bibliolaters such as Gladstone. He studiously ignored Christianity’s socially constructive character and the impulse which it has historically given to social reform.

In a previous number of The Newsletter, Professor Lynn’s defence of eugenics and evidence for the genetic deterioration of modern populations were considered (June 1997, review of Dysgenics). Huxley, for one, generally diverged from such attempts to explain human progress or decadence in terms of selection. In his critique of The Origin Of Species for the Westminster Review (published in 1860), Huxley had treated natural selection as only an hypothesis, not a proven theory, even regarding animal species. In Evolution and Ethics (his famous Romanes lecture of 1893), however, Huxley endorsed the ubiquity of struggle/selection in nature (although "persistent types" and the viability of small variations still bothered him). But he exempted civilised man from this (allegedly) pitiless "cosmic process", claiming that an "ethical process" was responsible for progress in human society.

Some commentators were left aghast by this division of the world order into two irreconcilable halves, a dichotomy reminiscent of Alfred Russell Wallace’s assertion (in Darwinism, 1889) that a superior intelligence had prepared primitive man for life in society. Surely, they insisted, Huxley had overlooked both the paramount role of altruism amongst the higher animals (what Henry Drummond aptly called the "struggle for the life of others"), and the existence of elaborate social organisation amongst insects?

The struggle for existence is the sine qua non of social development, according to Herbert Spencer. He feared that both had been suspended in the advanced societies. His complaint (revived by Professor Lynn) was that the relief of poverty and disease by the state enables the unfit to reproduce their kind and delays the adaptation of human nature to the complex, modern society.

Huxley, conversely, insisted that the measure of social progress is precisely the extent to which the individualism espoused by Spencer has been transcended. Or as Freud was to subsequently put it, in Civilisation and its Discontents, the substitution of the reign of justice for that of brute force is the decisive step in human progress.

Since the struggle for existence was confined to a small proportion of the population according to Professor Huxley’s estimate (the notorious residuum, at most 5%) and since this small group still managed to increase faster than the rich, this residual selection could exert no significant (beneficial) effect, he maintained. Unlike Richard Lynn, Huxley was not concerned that the mental and physical qualities of the English nation might actually be regressing, because of the "dysgenic" reproduction of this 5%.

In Evolution And Ethics, Huxley occupied the singularly depressing position of viewing the competition of civilised men as a struggle not for survival but for comfort, a Sisyphian struggle constantly frustrated by pressure of population and resultant poverty. He was too conventional apropos sexual matters to accept that birth control is the logical corollary of Malthusianism. (During Leonard Darwin’s Presidency of the Eugenics Education Society, likewise, many members, although not Havelock Ellis, still held back from accepting birth control, a potentially devastating weapon of negative eugenics, for fear of upsetting conventional morality).

Huxley’s only concession to the then fashionable theory of social Darwinism was to interpret the suspension of struggle within the group (thanks to the "ethical process") as the maximisation of its efficiency in inter-group struggle (see the prolegomena to Evolution And Ethics). This position was close to that of Galton’s more collectivist disciples, notably Karl Pearson. But too many of Huxley’s relations were suitable candidates for lethal chambers (notably his sister Ellen, a drunken parasite) for him to countenance eugenics, which he sneeringly called the "pigeon fancier’s polity".

Huxley: Evolution’s High Priest can be recommended, both as a portrait of Huxley and history of his times. The only quibble pertains to style. As readers of his previous works, such as The Politics of Evolution, will be aware, Adrian Desmond is summa cum laude in the academy of linguistic pyrotechnics. We were reminded of Kingsley Amis’s affectionately chiding remark about his gifted prodigy Martin, regretting his inability to make do with a simple sentence.

Leslie Jones