A Critique of Materialism in the Works of T. H. Huxley
Cory Butzon, April 18, 2003
PST 3103: Modern
Philosophy
Dr. Jon Johnson
Thomas Henry Huxley, often referred to as "Darwin's Bulldog," was chiefly responsible for advancing and popularizing the theory of evolution in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. As a scientist and a philosopher, Huxley was so taken by the progress of modern biology that he sought to establish a philosophy consistent with it. Biology at the time posed a brand new threat to many schools of thought: whereas physics was only able to provide laws governing that which we perceive to be outside of us, biology promised to deliver equally convincing laws about the very nature of the mind. Huxley recognized that the importance of biology to philosophy at the time was therefore great:
[A]ny one who is acquainted with the history of science will admit, that its progress has, in all ages, meant, and now, more than ever, means, the extension of the province of what we call matter and causation, and the concomitant gradual banishment from all regions of human thought of what we call spirit and spontaneity.
The consciousness of this great truth weighs like a nightmare, I believe, upon many of the best minds of these days. They watch what they conceive to be the progress of materialism, in such fear and powerless anger as a savage feels, when, during an eclipse, the great shadow creeps over the face of the sun. The advancing tide of matter threatens to drown their souls; the tightening grasp of law impedes their freedom; they are alarmed lest man's moral nature be debased by the increase of his wisdom.1
Clearly Huxley felt that humanity was losing its grip upon the spiritual world, and because he was a scientist himself, he embraced the change so long as he could find a philosophy consistent with it. But also evident in the above quotation is the sentiment of materialism in science of the day: despite objections, scientists and the field of science remained materialistic in nature.
Of course, Hume had already established the limits of scientific discovery. All logical pathways to matter and cause-and-effect relationships were abolished, thereby reducing science to the observation that certain sensations formerly called causes have always been followed by other sensations formerly called effects. Neither the essence of matter nor cause and effect were implicit; nor was it implicit that that at any given moment the so-called "laws" of science could not be refuted entirely. All of scientific principles—no matter what we call them or how much evidence supports them—are merely best-fit explanations. A single case that contradicts a hypothesis is all that is necessary to falsify that hypothesis, and such a discovery could occur at any moment. I have every practical reason to believe that the sun will rise tomorrow, and I have absolutely no reason to believe that it will not, but neither of these facts imply that the sun must rise.
Huxley therefore avoided the philosophical trap of materialism, but instead viewed materialistic thinking as the only real pathway of science:
This union of materialistic terminology with the repudiation of materialistic philosophy, I share with some of the most thoughtful men with whom I am acquainted. And, when I first undertook to deliver the present discourse, it appeared to me to be a fitting opportunity to explain how such a union is not only consistent with, but necessitated by, sound logic.1
The "materialistic terminology" Huxley speaks of is evident throughout his writing. In "The Hypothesis that Animals are Automata," he goes into great scientific detail to demonstrate that both man and animal are entirely governed by the physical activity of the brain and nervous system. In "The Physical Basis of Life," the influence of Darwin upon him is evident as he demonstrates that the difference between man and animal "is one of degree, not of kind." And as the title suggests, he proposes that the criterion of life is based in the realm of the physical world:
Protoplasm … is the formal basis of all life. It is the clay of the potter: which, bake it and paint it as he will, remains clay, separated by artifice, and not by nature, from the commonest brick or sun-dried clod. … What justification is there, then for the assumption of the existence in the living matter of a something which has no representative, or correlative, in the not living matter which gave rise to it?1
Over a century after this statement was made, Huxley certainly would appear to be correct by scientific standards. (The term "protoplasm" is no longer used, but the cellular basis of life is the most fundamental dogma of modern biology.) Even before Huxley's time, it was becoming clear that a fundamental difference between living and non-living chemistry was not to be found. In 1828, Friedrich Wohler synthesized urea, an organic molecule, from inorganic reagents, thus casting serious doubt upon the conception that some sort of "life force" (spiritual or otherwise) was necessary to the chemistry of life.
One cannot help but notice the relationship between Huxley's philosophy and that of Thomas Hobbes, which predates the former by well over two centuries. The central problem with Hobbes' philosophy had been the problem of explaining mind in terms of matter in motion. If all of existence can be classified as such, what matter and what motion generate what we perceive as sensation and consciousness? Hobbes introduced the concept of "phantasms"—knowers of motion—to explain this phenomenon. But in doing so, he essentially contradicted his entire doctrine of first philosophy by introducing an element of reality that cannot be explained as matter. And Descartes, who Huxley deeply admired, did not do much better when he asserted that the Pineal gland allowed for the interaction of body and mind.
Why would anyone as educated as Huxley adopt a philosophy with such fundamental difficulties? The answer lies in the science of biology, which made great advances in the centuries following Hobbes. That for which Hobbes had no good explanation—the interaction of the mind with matter—became plausible with the discovery of the nervous system, which provided a mechanism for parts of the body to communicate with the brain and vice-versa. The fact that the brain itself consists of countless networks of nerves made the need of phantasms to explain the occurrence of consciousness dwindle. (It should be noted that the brain is very poorly understood in scientific terms even today. Despite the work of countless physiologists, ethologists, and psychologists, the mechanisms of consciousness and thought are still guesses at best.) As science shed light upon the mechanism through which nerves work, "phantasms" fell to the metaphysical concept of "animal spirits," which in turn gave way to "nervous fluid," which had a purely physical basis as the substance inside of nerve cells. Further advancing the view of a physical basis of life, the hypothesis that a fundamental difference existed between living and non-living matter was rejected. The first documented in vitro synthesis of an organic molecule from inorganic starting materials was made by Friedrich Wohler in 1828, this casting serious doubt upon, if not entirely destroying, the idea that a life-force (spiritual or otherwise) was necessary for the chemistry of life.
Huxley, however, did not consider himself a materialist. He states that he is "utterly incapable of conceiving the existence of matter if there is no mind in which to picture that existence."2 The existence of matter, whether or not a mind exists to imagine it, depends upon the definition of matter. Hobbes would clearly object to Huxley by saying that matter is "that which having no dependence upon our thought, is coextended with some part of space." But how can one possibly know that something exists independent of our thought processes? It is logically groundless, although not impossible, that what we call matter does exist independent of our thought, and this this would certainly be our natural inclination. But it is no less reasonable to assume, as Huxley does in the tradition of Kant, that matter (in the form of spatial relationships) exist because the world is required to fit the expectations and limitations of the mind, not the other way around. Therefore, we have no reason to suspect matter is ultimate, as we have no way of proving that our minds accurately represent that which we suppose to be outside of us.
But in returning to science, I think most scientists would give an entirely different account of matter. They would point to the atomic theory of matter and assert that atoms—electrons, protons, neutrons—are the basis of matter. Centuries of scientific discovery have given us every reason to believe that the theory is accurate, and no reason to doubt the theory whatsoever. But proof is a scientific impossibility, and even this theory is subject to the doubts raised earlier. The concept of atoms and all their associated properties are still limited by the fact that the world, and all our observations of it, must fit the expectations of our mind. All the atomic theory really does is give another building block from which we are inclined to suppose matter. "Atoms" are no more proof of matter than are wood and stone: they are all specific examples of something we can point to and call matter, but none of them by themselves imply the existence of matter. (An obvious difference here is that atoms are not directly detectable by the senses; rather, the theory is by far the best-fit hypothesis to explain the observations of the chemist and the quantum physicist.) Rather than say, "my wooden desk is matter," we find ourselves saying "these carbon and hydrogen atoms are matter." Neither statement seems to rest upon firmer philosophical ground than the other.
An interesting consequence of Huxley's conclusions is that the concept of free will is limited considerably. We have the freedom to do what we would like to do, but in doing so, we have not escaped the cause-and-effect relationships that define existence:
[A]n agent is free when there is nothing to prevent him from doing that which he desires to do. … We are conscious automata, endowed with free will in the only intelligible sense of that much-abused term—inasmuch as in many respects we are able to do as we like—but none the less parts of the great series of causes and effects which, in unbroken continuity, composes that which is, and has been, and shall be—the sum of existence.2
A cause-and-effect relationship is obviously assumed here, and Hume clearly demonstrated that there is no logical basis for such an assumption. No matter how many times an observation has been made, it is still simply an observation. However, as long as a cause-and-effect relationship is assumed as a heuristic and not as an absolute, the concept adds to, rather than detracts from, our understanding of the world. As long as a scientist remembers in the back of his mind that observations can never imply necessity, he will be much better off when it comes to advancing science.
My freedom, then, must be dependent upon what I desire to do. If my sole desire right now is to be writing a philosophy paper, then indeed I am free. But is this really free will? Will I not always do what I desire, within the restraints placed upon me? I cannot say that I will not, so far as I can tell, always do what I most desire to do. If I choose to undertake in what appears to me to be the best of my options, I have indeed followed my desires. But if I choose something else, did I go against my desires? No, in this case, I was simply confused on a conscious level about what my desires truly were. The world Huxley is describing as "free" looks remarkably similar to the world created by Spinoza in which we are (so long as our emotions are passive) enslaved to the cause-and-effect relations of the world. So long as we do simply what we desire to do, we remain a part of the cause-and-effect machine of existence. If this is to be called freedom, I've set my expectations too high. Huxley's definition of free will would seem to include, at least theoretically, exactly what I view as the opposite of freedom.
But beyond concerns of freedom, the real question arising from all of this is whether or not the materialistic conception of the common scientist is necessary to science. Looking at history, it seems that science has flourished quite well both then and today without much of a care for the philosophical basis behind it. Galileo certainly wasn't hindered by the fact that the world was not ready for his work; likewise, the scientists of today who are splicing genes and cloning tissue aren't hindered too much by those of us who are still trying to sort out the significance of such actions. The so-called "materialistic terminology" Huxley refers to in science doesn't have to be interpreted at materialism, either. To assert that a physical basis of life exists says only that a certain set of scientific criteria have been observed in all forms of life.
Such terminology does not also imply that there is not something spiritual beyond the scientific basis of life. But simply by the nature of scientific inquiry, if something beyond our detection does in fact exist, it makes little difference to science. Scientific investigation is limited to that which can be observed and manipulated, thereby producing testable hypotheses. The broad set of ideas lying outside these criteria—regardless of how important they may be—are simply beyond our knowledge. A scientist performing science, for example, has no business at all holding arguments over spirit or religion. While infinitely many possibilities on the subject exist, they are all beyond our detection. Why trouble ourselves with that which we cannot possibly know?
Thus, I do not envision Huxley as a materialist. He is well aware of the problems inherent with materialism, and despite the fact that he adopts the position that all of life is knowable in terms of a physical basis, he is careful to remind himself and us that such a physical basis does not imply that matter is ultimate.
Bibliography
1 Huxley, Thomas H. "On The Physical Basis of Life." 1868.
2 Huxley, Thomas H. "On The Hypothesis that Animals are Automata, and it's History." 1874.