Huxley Ends a Truce

The days of Darwin when the church attacked the teachings of science are long since past, but last week the old argument was revived--this time by Julian Huxley, grandson of Darwin's great interpreter Thomas Huxley.

The truce between religion and science has been based on the assumption of both most churchmen and most scientists that religion and science are separate realms, that the truth of God and the truth of the scientific world are complementary. Last spring FORTUNE published four philosophical articles by four learned professors,*all of them expounding this view in one form or another.

Biologist Julian Huxley, agreeing with none of them, asked leave to reply and does so in the December FORTUNE. His reply directly challenges those who try philosophically to reconcile science and religion. Presenting a coherent philosophy of man's object in life, he makes the flat assertions that:

Body and soul are not separate entities but two aspects of one organization. . . . Matter and mind are two aspects of one reality.

The supernatural is in part the region of the natural that has not been understood, in part an invention of human fantasy, in part the unknowable.

Man must not attempt to put off any of his burden of responsibility on to the shoulders of outside powers.

More Science. Huxley's answer to the argument that science is insufficient to man's needs and aspirations is to demand more science: "When men assert that the scientific approach is incomplete it is because they have not been willing to follow it to its final conclusion, or because they are mistaking an early stage in its growth for full development."

Science, Huxley points out, began with the simpler phenomena; its first triumphs were in mechanics and simple! physics; chemistry took another century. "The central fact of biology, evolution was not established until modern science had been in existence for over two hundred years. ... In the same way the science of mind developed later than biological science. What Newton was for mechanics and physics, and Darwin for biology, Freud was for psychology--the originator of a new and illuminating way of thinking."

The World Stuff. Huxley flatly rejects the philosophic dualism which divides truth into two kinds, scientific and revealed. He declares that the world, living and lifeless, mental and physical, is composed of one stuff. "In reproduction there is no moment at which life enters . . . the offspring is merely a detached portion of the parental living substance."

Dualists have classically insisted that .a dead man differs from a live one by the loss of a soul. But, says Huxley, a dead body is not the same as a living body, the chemical conditions are different: "If you substitute oil for acid in the battery of your automobile, no current will pass." The electric eel can light a lamp; less visible, but none the less real are the currents which accompany all vital activity. In the same manner, "all the activities of the world stuff are accompanied by mental as well as material happenings."

Progress Is Possible. Evolution, gradual and continuous, was the bridge between matter and man. More important, scientifically, declares Huxley, is perception of the fact of evolutionary progress. Many species were mere diversifications; others trended toward specialization which ran them into a dead end; a few evolved an all-round development (i.e., specialized in mind). It is this last development which Biologist Huxley calls progress: "It is concrete and measurable. It consists in an increased control by life over its environment, an increased independence to the changes of that environment, an increase of knowledge, of harmonious complexity and self-regulation."

Man remains not only the highest product of evolution but "the sole repository of any possible future progress. . . . With human consciousness, values and ideals appeared on earth for the first time. . . . The quest for truth and knowledge, virtue, beauty and esthetic expression, and its satisfaction through the channels of science and philosophy, mysticism and morality, literature and the arts, becomes one of the modes or avenues of evolutionary progress."

Into the Morass. Huxley's avenue runs straight to the shadowy battlefield where man meets himself in the dark, and it is here in the morass of ethics and morals that the biologist comes to grips hardest with theologians and metaphysicians. "Man," says he, "is the only organism whose mind is so constructed that conflict is inevitable." Holding high the contributions of Freud, Huxley defines repression as an adaptation to conflict. "Undoubtedly the picture of human psychology given by psychoanalysis and other modern dynamic theories is crude and incomplete, but equally undoubtedly it is a first approximation to the truth.

"Its importance for philosophy and especially for ethics is enormous, for it enables us to understand how ethical and other values can be absolute in principle while remaining obstinately relative in practice; and in conjunction with our knowledge of evolution, it enables us to reconcile absolutism and relativism by uniting them in the concept of right direction. . . .

"Existing ethicoreligious systems often contain a large element of psychological compensation: they compensate for the miseries of this world with the bliss of a world to come . . . for ignorance of fact with certitude of feeling ... for imperfections of ethical practice by setting up impossible ethical ideals. This is not merely hypocrisy; it is a primitive method of self-defense.

"To become truly adult," Huxley concludes, "we must learn to bear the burden of incertitude." With widened understanding of the reasons for man's fears and hopes, the biologist looks for radical changes in the upbringing of children, in methods of education, and in accepted religions and codes of ethics. "The most difficult lesson to learn is that irrational and intolerant certitude is undesirable . . . but it must be learned if we are to emerge from psychological barbarism."

* Harvard's Philosopher William Ernest Hocking, Theologian Willard Learoyd Sperry; Columbia's Philosopher William Pepperell Montague; French Scholastic Jacques Maritain.

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