Pigs Might Fly: Gladstone, Huxley and the Debate over Evolution

© Jonathan Conlin - draft conference paper (unsuitable for citation)

Pigs might fly: Gladstone, Huxley and Evolution

Dr Jonathan Conlin (University of Southampton)

Though a great scholar of theology, Dante and the classics, William Ewart Gladstone’s

interest in the natural world seems to have been limited. A cabinet colleague, the 8th duke of Argyll,

recalled that he never seemed to care for the natural sciences.1 In December 1872 Gladstone wrote to

the great Oxford philologist Max Müller confessing that he felt unable to engage with scientific

debates. In particular he noted that he lacked the ‘physical knowledge really necessary to deal with

the Darwinian question’.2 A consideration of Gladstone’s response to the evolutionary ideas of

Charles Darwin, Thomas Huxley and other contemporaries might seem an unpromising topic.

Gladstone was born into William Paley’s universe, a finely-tuned instrument whose harmonies

revealed the intelligence and care of a beneficent deity. He lived to see this tidy universe challenged

by Lamarckianism, Robert Chambers’ Vestiges of Creation (1844) and the countless varieties of

transmutationism that emerged in the wake of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859).

The statesman only went into print on evolutionary questions twice: once in 1877, and again

after 1885. In both cases he seems to have wandered into querelles not of his own choosing, having

first lost his disciplinary bearings in some obscure corner of Homeric study, his favourite pastime.

The first and shorter of the two episodes began when Gladstone’s close analysis of the vocabulary of

the Iliad led into an excursus on the evolution of colour perception. The harsh criticism meted out to

the errant scholar-statesman by well-known men of science can make such episodes seem tragi-

comic. Gladstone could be cast as the endearingly otherworldly and by 1885 somewhat doddery

polymath, run to earth by ‘the professionals’ - ‘scientific’, yet perhaps somewhat unsympathetic in

their rigour.3

The treatment meted out to Gladstone by the biologist Thomas Henry Huxley in the second of

these evolutionary escapades can seem almost cruel. The querelle with ‘Darwin’s bulldog’ was

fought out in the pages of The Nineteenth Century between November 1885 and April 1891, and saw

Gladstone and Huxley tussle first over the account of Creation in Genesis and then over the New

Testament episode in which Christ casts devils into a herd of swine outside the city of Gadara.

Huxley’s biographer Adrian Desmond gives a typically gung-ho account of the bulldog’s ruthless

‘polishing off’ of the Grand Old Man.4 David Bebbington offers a more balanced if short assessment,

noting that ‘the discussion, which terminated inconclusively, was as much about the applicability of

scientific method as about the legitimacy of pig-keeping on the shores of Lake Galilee.’5 Otherwise

Gladstone’s biographers have tended to overlook the episode.6

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The Nineteenth Century essays do not show the best side of either Gladstone or Huxley: the

former comes across as a casuist in places, the latter as a snide bully. Although Argyll and Müller

served as allies or seconds to Gladstone and Huxley respectively, even their participation could seem

half-hearted at times. The humour - and there are flashes of it - is ill-natured. It is important not to

forget that the ‘Hawarden Kite’ went up in the middle of this querelle, in December 1885. This

announcement of Gladstone’s conversion to Home Rule for Ireland outraged Unionists, including

Huxley. Indeed, one might see this as a scientific proxy-fight, Huxley’s sideshow to the anti-Home

Rule pamphlet published by his close friend, the physicist and fervent Orangeman John Tyndall.7

The only clear winner was James Knowles, editor of The Nineteenth Century. Gladstone and Huxley

had already been the monthly’s most stalwart contributors (the former with 23, the latter 13 essays)

since its establishment in 1877, but Knowles nonetheless worked hard to keep the arguments going:

slipping each combatant advance copies of their opponent’s next essay, allowing them to overrun the

usual word limit and upping Huxley’s fee.8 Huxley’s stylized and mock-deferential tone smacks of

grandstanding, of spinning out a fight that could be finished off surgically. This was intellectual

debate reduced to the level of a spectator sport. ‘Have you read Gladstone’s “Genesis”?’ ran a joke

of the time. “No, I’m waiting for his Exodus!”’9

Why return to this embarrassing episode from the career of Britain’s greatest politician and

statesman? There are several reasons, starting with the importance the combatants themselves

accorded to it, their sense that much more was at stake than porcine possession. Each thought the

essays important enough to republish.10 Huxley went on to plan a 34-chapter study of ‘The Natural

History of Christianity’ that would have developed ideas first deployed against Gladstone. His

important Nineteenth Century essays on ‘Agnosticism’ and his 1894 Romanes Lectures on

‘Evolution and Ethics’ were also products of his wrestling match with Gladstone, who gave the

Romanes lectures the previous year. Though Huxley never got round to writing his book-length

reprise of the querelle before his death in June 1895, Gladstone did, in the shape of The Impregnable

Rock of Holy Scripture (1890).11

More importantly, the Nineteenth Century debate affords us a way into the great Victorian

statesman’s response to the most powerful idea of his age. Although Bebbington has noted that

Gladstone met theories of transmutation with ‘a mixture of an open mind with cautious reserve’,

otherwise Gladstone’s response to evolution - or ‘development’, as it was often termed at the time -

has received little attention.12 This debate has its roots in the 1840s, and so this essay continues a line

of thought on the Gladstonian concept of history that I advanced in a previous article on Gladstone’s

engagement with Christian Art in that decade.13 Although he certainly did read Origin on its

publication in 1859, Gladstone’s first serious engagement with ‘development’ came much earlier, in

the context of John Henry Newman’s ‘development of doctrine’.14 This approach to church history

was first mooted in an 1842 Oxford sermon and fully expounded in Newman’s Essay on the

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development of doctrine (1845); a book completed before the author’s conversion to Roman

Catholicism (9 October) and published immediately after it.

As we shall see, Gladstone worked out a conservative response to ‘development’ that would

later serve as a defence not against evolution per se, but rather against the evolutionary scientism of

Huxley. Central to this project was Bishop Butler’s concept of the probability of evidence. For

Gladstone it was the inability first of Newman and later of Huxley to accept that scriptural

knowledge and scientific knowledge was ‘graduated’ that made their interpretation of ‘development’

so dangerous. This interpretation was actually narrowing the realm of reasoned individual human

enquiry by applying an ontology that posited a sharp distinction between knowledge and ignorance.

Instead of sifting natural and church history for probable fragments of truths originally given via a

primitive revelation Huxley and Newman were both guilty of using ‘development’ to cut themselves

loose from the past.

While this gave the Roman Catholic church and the Darwinian ‘church scientific’ sweeping

powers to construct artificial pedigrees for their preferred dogmas. It also left them, Gladstone

believed, with no secure guide for future action. For his part Huxley claimed to be unable to accept

that any knowledge-bearing message could be conditioned by its recipients, by its public. With the

political elite redefining its relationship to a rapidly expanding electorate and the authorities facing

off against the restive masses of the ‘Bloody Monday’ riots (8 February 1886) such arguments could

smack of pandering to ‘public opinion’, not least when they came from the mouth of Liberalism’s

‘Great Communicator’. Set in its religious, scientific and political context a quarrel over the Hebraic

cosmogony and Jesus’ ‘swine miracle’ becomes much more interesting. By rights this sixty-year old

scientific heavyweight should have knocked out the defenceless octogenarian in one round,

defending the title won off Bishop “Soapy Sam” Wilberforce at the Oxford meeting of the British

Association for the Advancement of Science in 1860. But the evolutionary featherweight packed a

punch.

I

Before discussing the issues at stake in the Gladstone-Huxley querelle it is necessary to offer a brief

summary of the various exchanges in The Nineteenth Century, and unpick the arguments being made

by either side, and by their allies. The debate’s origins lay in Albert Réville’s Prélogomène de

l’histoire des religions (1883), in which the cleric and Professor of the Collège de France breezily

dismissed Gladstone’s arguments for primitive revelation in Genesis made in his 1858 three-volume

work Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age. Réville’s work appeared in English translation in

1885, with an introduction by Max Müller. The similarities between Genesis and non-Hebraic

creation myths clearly indicated to Réville that they were all products of a certain stage in man’s

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mytho-poetic growth. Revelation just didn’t belong in a scientific discussion. To believe that Genesis

contained vestiges of knowledge gained by direct revelation at an early stage in human development

‘would make religious history the reverse of all others’, Réville argued.15

Gladstone read Réville in the summer of 1885 and responded in the first of the Nineteenth

Century articles: ‘Dawn of Creation and of Worship: a reply to Dr Réville’, which appeared in the

November issue.16 It was not ‘scientific’ Gladstone argued, to refuse to consider supernatural causes

out of hand. His belief in revelation was not assumption, but a conclusion he had reached by means

of reason. ‘It is not inconceivable that revelation might be indefinitely graduated, as well as human

knowledge and condition.’17 Far from being a bolt of divine knowledge that simply overwhelmed

human conceptions of their universe and silenced rational enquiry, revelation was a current that

could be transformed by God, converted into a lower voltage that charged, but did not short-circuit,

the minds of men. Revelation was adjusted to man’s ability to comprehend it; Gladstone would later

call this ‘the rule of relativity’.18 It was foolish, therefore, to expect Genesis to read as a scientific

text when it was not originally intended ‘to rear cosmic philosophers’ but ‘to furnish ordinary men

with some idea of what the Creator had done in the way of providing for them a home, and giving

them a place in nature.’19

Gladstone was not, he insisted, suggesting that ‘developed doctrine’ was to be found in

Homer, but only ‘rudimentary indications’. Homer contained

a number of traits, incongruous in various degrees with their immediate environment,

but having such marked and characteristic resemblances to the Hebrew tradition as to

require of us, in the character of rational inquirers, the admission of a common origin,

just as the markings, which we sometimes notice upon the coats of horses and donkeys, are

held to require the admission of their relationship to the zebra.20

This last was a reference to the famous case of Lord Morton’s breeding experiments with quagga

seventy years previous. Gladstone was in effect arguing that the species Homer had certain traits that

could not be explained as evolutionary adaptations to its environment. But in pointing that out he was

not refusing to think in evolutionary terms. On the contrary, he was seeking to explain these traits as

evidence for ‘common origin’. That ‘common origin’ might be primitive revelation - that is,

something supernatural. But reason (one might even say evolutionary reason) led the inquirer back to

it.

Gladstone went on to claim that the order in which different creatures (fishes, birds,

mammals, etc) were created by God in Genesis represented a ‘fourfold succession…entirely

harmonising, according to present knowledge, with belief in a revelation’.21 This created a problem

which opponents of primitive revelation had to solve: how could the Hebrews have come to know

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‘that order, to possess knowledge which natural science has only within the present century for the

first time dug out of the bowels of the earth?’22 The Hebraic cosmogony of Genesis was simply too

sophisticated to have been assembled from fragments of Egyptian or Babylonian creation myth

available at the time. It was as if one had found an iPhone in the hand of a caveman. Alfred Russel

Wallace had been making similar arguments in a zoological context since 1869, in what Darwin,

Huxley and others interpreted as a betrayal of the theory of natural selection he had discovered in

1858. The human larynx (the morphology that enables speech), the massive human brain, the bird’s

wing and other organs could not, Wallace argued, have emerged by means of the slow accretion of

beneficial mutations through natural selection. A higher intelligence must have intervened at these

points in natural history to shift evolution up a gear.

Gladstone had read Wallace back in 1874, albeit without registering much of a response at

the time.23 Unfortunately Gladstone’s Mosaic cosmogony did not, in fact, represent an uncanny

foreshadowing of the fossil record revealed by Victorian palaeontologists. As he wrote to Henry

Acland, ‘I too hastily assumed there was a general acceptance of the fourfold succession of fishes

birds beasts and men - in a rough general way - as rightly placed by the author of Genesis.’24 The

discovery of the bird-like Archaeopteryx in 1859 made a concordance difficult.25 Though as a

scientist Argyll has been overlooked by scholars Gladstone’s Liberal colleague had published several

books on evolution, advancing a theory of guided ‘evolution by law’ in Unity of Nature (1884),

which took many of the same morphological conundrums as Wallace had to argue that natural

selection could not explain all of evolution.26 Argyll warned Gladstone that his essay was ‘liable to

attack’; ‘there is no doubt that flying animals - your “air population” - do not occupy quite the

position you assign to them’.27 Gladstone asked him as well as Henry Acland to recommend further

reading as well as the names of scholars he might consult, but it was too late.28 Gladstone could

already read Huxley’s riposte in the December Nineteenth Century.

‘The Interpreters of Genesis and the Interpreters of Nature’ saw Huxley interpose himself

reluctantly into Réville and Gladstone’s disagreement, introducing himself as ‘uncommissioned

science proctor’.29 Huxley pointed out the obvious problems with the ‘fourfold succession’ with great

care, partly to head off any possible quibbling, partly because he obviously enjoyed it. ‘It may seem

superfluous to add to the evidence that Mr. Gladstone has been utterly misled in supposing that his

interpretation of Genesis receives any support from natural science’, he wrote, ‘But it is as well to do

one’s work thoroughly while one is about it…’30 Gladstone read ‘The Interpreters of Genesis’ on 2

December. Bolstered by advice and further reading, he set to work on his riposte. On the 17

December the ‘Hawarden Kite’ went up, sending shock waves across the nation. Back in August

Gladstone had dropped a hint to James Knowles regarding his plan for Irish Home Rule.31 Herbert

Gladstone continued softening the ground in December, and now ‘Mr Gladstone’s Plan for Ireland’

was splashed across the newspapers, the biggest scoop (or plant, depending on how you look at it) of

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the year. ‘Telegrams to Press. Assn, C. News and other quarters on the Irish rumours about me’

noted Gladstone in his diary.32

The following day he chopped down a tree, returned to his desk and despatched his essay to

Knowles. His ‘Proem to Genesis: a plea for a fair trial’ appeared in the January 1886 issue of the

Nineteenth Century, alongside a delayed rebuttal from Réville to ‘Dawn of Worship’.33 Gladstone

now charged Huxley with following Réville in holding the writer of Genesis ‘responsible for

scientific precision...He thinks [Genesis] is a lecture. I think it is a sermon.’ Drawing on his reading,

and especially a work of Joseph Prestwich’s (then in press) to which Henry Acland drew his

attention, Gladstone tweaked rather than abandoned his ‘fourfold succession’ argument, insisting that

Genesis remained - for all the limitations imposed on it, not least of space - in accordance with the

findings of contemporary science.34 He also elaborated his critique of those who saw revelation ‘as if

it were a lawyer’s parchment, or a sum in arithmetic’, something that entirely collapsed if any flaw

were discovered.35 Revelation was not a question of all-or-nothing, but of Butlerian probability.36 The

essay rather fizzled out towards the end, as Gladstone turned to address a secondary feud which

seemed to be breaking out (also in the Nineteenth Century) with Max Müller.37

Huxley’s second contribution was published in the February issue as ‘Mr Gladstone and

Genesis’, and began by recapitulating the debate. Genesis was simply a myth, a venerable

‘monument of a stage in the mental progress of mankind’, just as unscientific as, and equally

interchangable with, Egyptian or Babylonian creation narratives.38 He went on to draw out some

unflattering political implications of the distinction Gladstone had drawn between a ‘sermon’ and a

‘lecture’. Huxley’s disdain for Gladstone as one who supposedly manipulated mass opinion was

becoming clear.39 Huxley was prepared to concede that the writer of Genesis honestly believed that

what he was saying happened in the first week of Creation ‘conveyed the “actual historical truth”’.40

Gladstone on the other hand seemed to be confusing myth and reality, persuasion and conviction,

‘moral impression’ and observed fact.41 The debate was turning ugly.

Gladstone had been invited to form a government at the end of January and kissed hands at

Osborne on 1 February 1887. He does not seem to have read ‘Mr Gladstone and Genesis’, though he

did read the first part of Huxley’s two-part essay ‘The Evolution of theology: an anthropological

study’, which appeared in the March issue of Nineteenth Century. Having previously censured

Gladstone as an interloper in science, Huxley now did some interloping of his own, arguing that the

Bible was made up of ‘stratified deposits’ from different cultures and eras. ‘Our problem is

palaeontological.’ Both scripture and ‘the evolution of theology’ were to be treated as ‘fossil

remains’, as ‘a question of anthropology’.42 In the 1860s there had been much interest among

historical and philological circles in using the ‘comparative method’ to construct analogies across

cultures and historical periods.43 In ‘The Evolution of Theology’ Huxley applied this method with a

vengeance, drawing analogies across wide geographical and chronological gaps to show how all

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cultures passed through the same process of moving from belief in ghosts, through ancestor cults and

polytheism to monotheism, itself a phase man would presumably outgrow.44

These were relationships without any possibility of ‘common origin’ in a genealogical sense.

Huxley found among contemporary Tongans ‘all the features of old Israelitic theology’.45 In

deploying terms such as ‘theological equipment’ Huxley was consciously borrowing from the

palaeontology of John Lubbock and Edwin Tylor, with its neat check-lists of technologies by which

any tribe from any moment in recorded time and any point on the globe could be plotted onto a fixed,

universal march of progress.46 For Huxley to apply this model and present it as the latest science is

odd. As Adrian Desmond has noted it is pre-Darwinian ‘chain of being’ thinking.47 Towards the end

of ‘The Evolution of Theology’ Huxley proposes a different, less linear paradigm, however; one

consisting of a constant oscillation between impersonal symbols and personal idols, between the

human intellect’s tendency to abstraction and its ‘lower’ urge to incarnate and fetischize.48 This was

intriguing stuff, but Gladstone never got that far. He only read the first (March) installment, and

found it ‘rather thin and pretentious’.49

Having consumed around 250 pages of the Nineteenth Century in its first six months, the

Gladstone-Huxley querelle died down for a while.50 This despite the fact that Gladstone felt himself

to have been ‘prevented from following to the close what I had said’.51 It started up again in 1889.

The famous Gadarene swine were first mentioned by Huxley in his February 1889 Nineteenth

Century essay ‘Agnosticism’, one of a series of baits probably intended to goad Gladstone into

rejoining the fray.52 But the essay also featured a highly-sophisticated discussion highlighting the

difficulties of discerning a ‘Christian’ pedigree through the scattered strata of doctrine laid down

over centuries of Jewish and Christian religion. Was Christianity to be understood in terms of

Cuvierite comparative anatomy, as a perfect archetype that countless theologians had struggled in

vain to embody in doctrine? Or was it an evolutionary family tree of different sects budding out of

each other?53

From this point the querelle underwent its own Gadarene descent. Gladstone chose to pick up

on Huxley’s censure of the swine miracle as contrary to ‘law and justice’. He initially did so not in

the pages of The Nineteenth Century, but in the conclusion to his book The Impregnable Rock of

Holy Scripture (1890), itself a compendium of articles he had previously published in Good Words.

Impregnable Rock was something of a reprise of the case he had put in his earlier Nineteenth Century

essays. Gladstone argued that as Gadara was under Mosaic law, so the keeping of the swine had been

illegal, and Jesus’ destruction of the herd a police action.54 In his regular Nineteenth Century essays

Huxley had moved on to disproving the Deluge, but was happy enough to return to the Gadarene

trough. A cheerful sketch in a letter written to Knowles in November shows Gladstone riding a

Gadarene pig, caught in mid-descent.55 His essay ‘The Keepers of the Herd of Swine’, Gladstone’s

‘Professor Huxley and the Swine Miracle’ and Huxley’s ‘Illustrations of Mr. Gladstone’s

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Controversial Methods’ appeared in the Nineteenth Century in December 1890 and in February and

March 1891 respectively. Argyll, Gladstone’s loyal lieutenant, submitted two further articles in

January and April 1891.

The discussion bogged down in questions of whether Gadara had been a Greek or Hebrew

settlement when Jesus visited it, and whether Leviticus’ ban on touching dead pigs implied a ban on

touching live ones. If it did, pig keeping was also prohibited. Yet Gladstone had the bit between his

teeth, devoting fifteen days to preparing his ‘anti-Huxley paper’: ‘I think I am emerging from the

puzzle’ he wrote on Christmas Day 1890 (the holiday did not distract him), ‘and it is for the honour 1 George Douglas, 8th Duke of Argyll, Autobiography and memoirs (2 vols., London, 1906), 2:2. Though Gladstone’s diaries show that he read most of Argyll’s own scientific works, and discussed them with him. See M. R. D. Foot and H. C. G. Matthew, eds, The diaries of William Gladstone [hereafter GD] (14 vols., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968-7), 7:43 (21 March 1869: ‘Conversation with D. of Argyll on his “Primitive Man” all of which I read.’), 6:502 (23-5 February 1867), 11:108 (3-4 February 1884).2 Richard Shannon, Gladstone: heroic minister 1865-1898 (London: Allen Lane, 1999), p. 117.3 As Elizabeth Bellmer has noted, Gladstone’s article quickly drew ‘national and international response…very little of it…positive.’ Charles Darwin was, however, characteristically forthcoming and helpful, even though it was obvious that he too saw the glaring flaw in Gladstone’s argument. E. H. Bellmer, ‘The Statesman and the ophthalmologist: Gladstone and Magnus on the evolution of human colour vision’, Annals of Science 56 (1999), 25-45 (34, 37).4 Adrian Desmond, Huxley: evolution’s high priest (London: Michael Joseph), pp. 162-4. For a more nuanced reading, see Paul White, Thomas Huxley: making the ‘man of science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 138-141.5 D. W. Bebbington, The Mind of Gladstone: religion, Homer, and politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 245.6 Magnus claims that Gladstone ‘was trying to defend the literal truth of the account of the Creation.’ Philip Magnus, Gladstone (London: John Murray, 1954), p. 340. The debate is briefly mentioned by H. C. G. Matthew, Roy Jenkins and ignored by Richard Shannon. H. C. G. Matthew, Gladstone, 1875-1898 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985), p. 238. Roy Jenkins, Gladstone (London: Macmillan, 1995), pp. 528-9n.7 John Tyndall, Mr Gladstone and Home Rule (London: William Blackwood, 1887).8 In one year (1890) Huxley could earn £500 from his Nineteenth Century contributions. Desmond, Huxley: evolution’s high priest, pp. 163-4, 199. Knowles also had to get Huxley to tone down some of the invective. Leonard Huxley, Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley (2 vols., London: Macmillan), 2:116.9 Desmond, Huxley: evolution’s high priest, p. 168.10 Gladstone republished three of the essays in Later Gleanings: a new series of the gleanings of past years (London: John Murray, 1897).11 Desmond, Huxley: evolution’s high priest, p. 165.12 Bebbington, Mind of Gladstone, p. 236.13 Jonathan Conlin, ‘Gladstone and Christian Art, 1832-54’, Historical Journal 46.2 (2003), 341-74.14 Gladstone read Origin on 10 December 1859. GD 5:445.15 Albert Réville, Prolegomena of the history of religions trans. A. S. Squire (London: Williams and Norgate, 1884)p. 47.16 Gladstone read Squire’s translation of Réville after reading the book in the original French. Entries for 19 July and 13 September 1885. GD, 11: 373, 398.17 William Gladstone, ‘Dawn of Creation and of Worship’, The Nineteenth Century [hereafter NC] 105 (November 1885), 685-706 (686).18 Gladstone, The Impregnable Rock of Holy Scripture (London: William Isbister, 1890), p. 71. 19 Gladstone, ‘Dawn of Creation’, 690.20 Gladstone, ‘Dawn of Creation’, 689.21 Gladstone, ‘Dawn of Creation’, 694.22 Gladstone, ‘Dawn of Creation’, 696.23 His diary for 20 June 1874 records that he read ‘Wallace on Numbers of Mankind.’ In his edition of the diaries H. C. G. Matthew footnotes this as a reference to Wallace’s Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection (1870), although it is unclear which of the essays in that collection could be said to match Gladstone’s description. In 1878 Wallace did, however, respond to Gladstone’s 1877 Nineteenth Century article on colour perception. Bellmer, ‘The Statesman and the ophthalmologist’, 38.24 Gladstone to Henry Acland, 11 December 1885. Bodleian Library, Oxford. MS Acland.d.68, f. 74. 25 We should be careful of assuming that Gladstone was simply ignorant of Archaeopteryx due to insufficient reading. We know from both the diaries and his marginalia that he read Huxley’s lecture on bird-like fossils (including Archaeopteryx) in Huxley’s American Addresses (1877). Entry for 16 February 1879. GD, 9:390. See also Gladstone’s

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of the Lord.’56 Huxley was riding his own hobby-horse, sneeringly comparing Jesus’ pig-rustling

with Irish cattle-rustlers, and obliquely damning Gladstone’s ‘pious and patriotic pretexts’ for

supporting ‘Irish landgrabbers’.57 With some help from Réville, Müller and Argyll the Gladstone-

Huxley querelle managed to rack up sixteen articles and around 500 pages in the Nineteenth Century

between November 1885 and April 1891, and ranged widely across a range of disciplines and

historical periods. It had also sparked a great correspondence in The Times.58

marks by the illustrations in Huxley, American Addresses, with a lecture on the study of biology (London: Macmillan, 1877), pp. 62, 65, 68. Gladstone’s Library, Hawarden [hereafter GL]. K13/7.26 Bebbington, Mind of Gladstone, p. 234. For a rare discussion of Argyll as a man of science see Neal C. Gillespie, ‘The Duke of Argyll, evolutionary anthropology, and the art of scientific controversy’, Isis 68 (1974), 40-54.27 Though, he continued, ‘The general fact remains untouched that the progress of Creation seems as yet, to have been “from the simple to complex - from the lower to the higher”‘. Argyll to Gladstone, 6 December 1885. BL AddMSS 44106, f. 32.28 Argyll suggested Richard Owen, but noted that he ‘is too old now to be quite safe as a guide’. Argyll proposed Robert Etheridge of the Natural History Museum, ‘an admirable man - very careful and sound and with a thorough knowledge.’ Gladstone wrote to Owen on 5 December and over the following days read Owen’s Palaeontology (1860) alongside other works by Joseph Ellison Portlock, Charles Lyell, William Buckland and John Phillips. Frustrated by Owen’s failure to point out the errors in his draft NC article, Gladstone complained to Thomas Dyke Acland, who was at Hawarden and with whom he discussed the debate during long walks in the woods. Thomas suggested he contact his brother, Henry Acland. Henry Acland put Gladstone on to Prestwich and secured permission for Gladstone to publish an extract from Prestwich’s forthcoming book. Bodleian Library, Oxford. MS Acland.d.68, ff. 70, 72, 74, 127, 129, 160, 177. Gladstone also wrote to Archdeacon William Palmer asking if the founders of Greek philosophy had taught evolution in either moral or physical form. Argyll to Gladstone, 9 December 1885. BL AddMSS 44106, f. 45. GD, 11: 441-3, 445. Claims that Gladstone failed to keep up with the literature need to be set in the context of his voracious reading. As Bellmer has noted, Gladstone had read 53 different works on human evolution between 1859 (when he read Origin) and 1877 alone. Bellmer, ‘The Statesman and the opththalmologist’, 28-29. 29 Thomas Henry Huxley, ‘The Interpreters of Genesis and the Interpreters of Nature’ [originally published NC 106 (December 1885)] in Huxley, Collected Essays, 9 vols. (London: 1893-4), 4 (Science and the Hebrew Tradition): 139-163 (140).30 Huxley, ‘The Interpreters of Genesis’, 160-1.31 He wrote that it would help ‘prog the public mind’ if the Nineteenth Century published articles on Ireland. Gladstone to James Knowles, 5 August 1885. Cited in GD, 11: 380-1. Shannon, Gladstone: heroic minister, pp. 372-3.32 Shannon, Gladstone: heroic minister, p. 398; GD, 11: 450.33 The delay was caused by the fact that Réville had been in Italy when Gladstone’s original article came out. But the fame of Gladstone was such that even there Réville found himself transformed into what he called a ‘personage’ by being thus singled out by the great statesman. Albert Réville, ‘Dawn of Creation - an answer’, NC (January 1886), 160-175 (161).34 Gladstone, ‘Proem to Genesis’, 10-13.35 Gladstone, ‘Proem to Genesis’, 5.36 ‘The question whether this Proem bears witness to a Divine communication, to a working beyond that of merely human faculties in the composition of the Scriptures, is essentially one for the disciples of Bishop Butler; a question, not of demonstrative, but of probable evidence.’ Gladstone, ‘Proem to Genesis’, 16.37 Müller was responding to perceived slights to his ‘solar theory’. Gladstone was prepared to concede that ‘single eyed’ ‘the stones of this magnificent fabric’ [the Olympian system] might show marks that they had previously been used in ‘an anterior system’. But to point this out was ultimately immaterial, as the hand that had ‘appropriated’ them remained that of a genius. Gladstone, ‘Proem to Genesis’, 21.38 Huxley, ‘Mr Gladstone and Genesis’, in Huxley, Collected Essays, 4:164-200 (180).39 His characteristic false modesty now contained an added sting, as when Huxley writes that he will ‘for once in my life’ appear as ‘a representative of average opinion which appears to be the modern ideal of a leader of men’. Huxley, ‘Mr Gladstone and Genesis’, 166.40 Huxley, ‘Mr Gladstone and Genesis’, 196.41 ‘Mr Gladstone’s definition of a sermon permits me to suspect that he may not see much difference between that form of discourse and what I call a myth; and I hope it may be something more than the slowness of apprehension...which leads me to imagine that a statement…which is “popular” and “aims mainly at producing moral impression”…amounts to a myth, or perhaps less than a myth.’ Huxley, ‘Mr Gladstone and Genesis’, 181.

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II

For Gladstone, however, ‘development’ began with Newman. Newman delivered his sermon on ‘The

Theory of Developments in Religious Doctrine’ at St Mary’s church in Oxford on the 2nd of

February 1843.59 Although Owen Chadwick has drawn up a pedigree for ‘development’ that goes

back through German Liberal Catholics like Möhler, he argues that Newman picked up the concept

from W. G. Ward.60 Newman spoke of a ‘large fabric of divinity…irregular in structure’. Its diverse

forms nonetheless shared certain relations with each other, ‘betokening a common origin’. For all the

apparent randomness and hesitation of its course, it was nonetheless clear that doctrine had ‘evolved’

in the minds of Christians, finding even in heresy itself a spur to ‘fresh forms’ and ‘farther

developments’.61 Newman addressed the conflict between scriptural and scientific narratives, but

instead of championing one over the other he claimed that both were true within their particular

paradigms, true ‘for certain practical purposes in the system in which they are respectively found’.62

42 Huxley, ‘The Evolution of Theology: an anthropological study’ [originally NC (March 1886), 346-65; NC (April 1886), 485-506] in Huxley, Collected Essays, 4: 287-372 (287-9).43 John Burrow, ‘The clue to the maze: the appeal of the comparative method’ in Stefan Collini, Donald Winch and John Burrow, eds, That Noble Science of Politics: a study in nineteenth-century intellectual history (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 208-246.44 Huxley claimed that there was no evidence of any human civilisation not having ghosts, despite the fact that Wallace had noted back in the 1869 that ghosts seemed to respect the line (now known as ‘Wallace’s Line’) separating Asian and Australasian fauna. Beliefs in ghosts were found on one side of it, Wallace reported, and not on the other. Huxley, ‘The Evolution of Theology’, 347; Alfred Russel Wallace, The Malay Archipelago; the land of the orang-utan and the bird of paradise: a narrative of travel with studies of man and nature [1869] (#), p. #.45 Huxley, ‘The Evolution of Theology’, 321.46 Huxley cites Edward Tylor’s Primitive Culture (1871). Huxley, ‘The Evolution of Theology’, 320. See also John Lubbock, Pre-historic times, as illustrated by ancient remains, and the manners and customs of modern savages (London: Williams and Norgate, 1865).47 Desmond, Huxley: evolution’s high priest, p. 164.48 Huxley, ‘The Evolution of Theology’, 372.49 Entry for 28 February 1886. GD, 11: 505. Huxley had asked Knowles not to publish the essay in two halves, ‘as I want the reader to have an aperçu of the whole process from Samuel of Israel to Sammy [Wilberforce] of Oxford.’ Huxley to Knowles, 20 January 1886. Huxley, Life and Letters, 2:117.50 Apart from a one-page piece from Gladstone refuting Huxley’s claim that Gladstone had neglected to consult the Yale professor James Dwight Dana in preparing his earlier essays. Gladstone, ‘Note on Genesis and Science’, NC (August 1886), 304. In 1895 Huxley was still insisting that if Gladstone ‘had only read Dana, he would have found his case much better stated than ever he stated it. He seemed never to have read the leading authorities on his own side.’ Huxley, Life and Letters, 2:427.51 Gladstone to Henry Acland, 15 March 1890. Bodleian Library, Oxford. MS Acland.d.68, f. 78.52 Huxley not only referred to Gladstone’s beloved Dante and Butler, but included more sneers at Gladstone’s pandering to public opinion. Huxley, ‘Agnosticism’ [originally published NC (February 1889), 169-194] in Huxley, Essays, 5:209-262 (219, 227, quote at 252).53 Huxley, ‘Agnosticism’, 231-2.54 The book was published in late November or December 1890. Gladstone, Impregnable Rock, pp. 269-271 55 Huxley to Knowles, 18 November 1890. Imperial College Archive, London [hereafter ICL]. Huxley Papers. #. Argyll did, however, take up the cudgels against Huxley on the issue of the deluge, although he was politic in avoiding the word ‘deluge’ in doing so. Huxley, ‘The Lights of the Church and the Light of Science’ [originally NC (July 1890)] in Huxley, Collected Essays 4:201-38. Argyll to Gladstone, 10 April and 15 December 1890. BL AddMSS 44106, ff. 198, 217. Argyll’s essay was published as ‘Professor Huxley on the Warpath’ NC (January 1891), 1-33. Gladstone refers to this debate in Impregnable Rock, p. 239.56 Gladstone, ‘Professor Huxley and the Swine Miracle’ in Gladstone, Later Gleanings, pp. 246-79. Gladstone admittedly confessed to his diary (16 December) that it was ‘not easy to follow the Gadara case’. GD, 12:350, 352 (Christmas).57 Huxley, ‘The Keepers of the Herd of Swine’ [originally NC (# 1889)] in Huxley, Essays, 5: 366-392 (390).58 Huxley, Life and Letters, 2:296.

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Newman worked on development from March 1844 to September 1845, and his Essay on

Development was published in November of that year. The book proposed a series of seven tests by

which true developments could be distinguished from false.

Gladstone had read and admired the earlier works of the German Liberal Catholic Möhler as

well as Ward. He had read Newman’s University sermons when they were published in March 1843,

the two met by chance the following month (17 April) and in early 1845 they exchanged letters

discussing Gladstone’s resignation from Sir Robert Peel’s Conservative government over the

Maynooth grant.63 Gladstone had expected more converts to have followed Newman into the Roman

Catholic church, and wished this ‘amputation’ could be ‘done at once’. ‘The feverish excitement

attending the prolongation of the process is far worse, because it has the effect of destroying

confidence within the Church’, he wrote to Henry Manning from Baden-Baden in October. ‘I

suppose and hope that Newman’s book will bring all this to a head, and that persons are waiting for

that in order to declare themselves.’64 When the Essay on Development arrived he was ready.

‘Received & went to work on Newman’s book:’, notes his diary entry for 28 November 1845, ‘with

some tho’ not enough sense of the seriousness of the task; I pray God to guide my mind in it.’65

Gladstone had just reassumed office eleven days before, ending that period of introspection and

intensive reading of Joseph Butler that followed his resignation over Maynooth the previous January.

Although it had been published the previous year, Gladstone had not spent his time out of

office on Robert Chambers’ anonymous bestseller Vestiges of Creation. Vestiges famously advanced

‘the developmental hypothesis’, a colourful patchwork quilt made up of the nebular hypothesis, the

latest geological discoveries of ‘deep time’, French comparative anatomy and the meliorist

phrenology of George Coombe. Chambers presented ‘the developmental hypothesis’ as the

overarching evolutionary process at work in the creation of the galaxy, our solar system and life

itself, understood as a relentless march from primordial ooze through men via apes and other

creatures. As Jim Secord has observed, Vestiges brought transmutation into the middle-class drawing

room for the first time.66 Something that had been reviled as dangerously blasphemous and

materialist became a source of safe intellectual thrill-seeking. Chambers proved surprisingly willing 59 He took Luke 2:19 as his text, where the Virgin Mary takes the angel’s annunciation and ‘ponders these things in her heart’. She does not simply ‘assent’ to the news of the incarnation, Newman noted, ‘she develops it’. John Henry Newman, Fifteen sermons preached before the University of Oxford between AD 1826 and 1843 [reprint of the 3rd ed., 1872] (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997), 312-51 (313).60 Owen Chadwick, From Bossuet to Newman: the idea of doctrinal development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957), pp. 116, 119.63 ‘Littlemore Church 3 P.M. Saw Newman & conv. on the road.’ [original emphasis]. Entry for 17 April 1843 (Easter Monday). GD, 3:273. This was the third time the two had met, the two previous being in 1831 and 1834. Of course, Littlemore (outside Oxford) was famous as Newman’s church, but the entry makes it clear that their conversation was not planned. 64 Gladstone to Henry Manning, 20 October 1845. D. C. Lathbury, Correspondence on church and religion of William Ewart Gladstone (2 vols., London: John Murray, 1910), 1: 348-350 (349).65 He read the University sermons on 26 March 1843. GD, 3: 268. He continued reading the Essay on 29 and 30 November, finishing it on 1 December, when he records writing ‘MS Note on a passage in Newman’. GD, 3:499.

11


to co-opt newer hypotheses in the many subsequent editions, and was careful to punctuate his

evolutionary heresies with passages in which the reader is invited to wonder at the divine intelligence

those very heresies supposedly indicate.

Such an accommodating, loose and open-ended text made it easy to see Vestiges and

Newman’s earlier Essay as related projects.67 They came together for Gladstone in the summer of

1847, which he largely spent with his father at Fasque. It was there that he finally got round to

reading Vestiges between the 12-17 July. The day he finished he recorded in his diary that he ‘Wrote

on Vestiges, or rather off it, for Butl[er]’.68 This eight-page memorandum concluded that the book

contained nothing ‘which ought in the slightest degree to shake the faith of the Christian’.69 After a

short trip down to London he returned to Fasque. He had hoped that his friend Henry Manning would

go into print against the Essay, but the more Manning read the more he found himself leaning

Newman’s way.70 Although it is unclear whether this was a draft for an intended publication, on

Sunday 8 August Gladstone began writing what would be a 68-page screed on Newman’s Essay,

fuelled by reading of Anglican critics who had already gone into print, notably J. B. Mozley’s essay

on ‘The theory of development’.71 At some later point, possibly in early 1848 he drafted a letter to

Newman on development that he never sent.72

In the memorandum Gladstone draws a distinction between the Church’s traditional appeal to

primitive revelation and its more recent attempt to stake its claim to truth on development. The

‘tactic of identity’ had involved asserting that the Church’s latter-day sacraments and doctrines were

the same as those of the church of Jesus and the apostles. The ‘tactic of development’ had been

adopted as part of a misjudged reaction to ‘the light of historical and critical march’ [sic], and had

replaced ‘historical continuity’ with a more organic model in which doubts over the virtue of specific

‘developments’ pressed in on every side.73 The ‘champion’ of this new ‘doctrine of development’

was left with a mountain to climb if he sought to justify the Church’s teachings and rites,

67 It is striking that Secord does not notice this. In his study of the response to Vestiges he notes Tractarian influences on several leading intellectuals who responded to Chambers’ book, but only observes that the Tractarians were noted for ‘opposing’ the study of science. Secord, Victorian Sensation, pp. 253-4.68 GD, 3:634-5 (635).69 Gladstone, ‘On “Vestiges of Natural Creation” in relation to Butler’, undated memo. BL AddMSS 44731, ff. 74-82 (75v). This is presumably the memo which he began at Fasque on 17 July. Diary entries for 23, 24, 26, 27 July (‘Worked on “Vestiges”‘) might imply that he continued drafting it, but given Gladstone’s speed in drafting the much longer memo on Newman’s Essay it would seem unlikely that it would have taken him so long. GD, 3: 635-7.70 David Nicholls, ‘Gladstone and the Anglican critics of Newman’ in James D. Bastaple, ed., Gladstone and Newman: centennial essays (Dublin: Veritas, 1978), pp. 121-144 (125). 71 Gladstone, ‘Protestantische Beantwortung p. 179’, undated memorandum. BL AddMSS 44736, ff. 265-333. As the heading makes clear, the memo was immediately triggered by his reading of Carl Nitzsch’s book Eine protestantische Beantwortung der Symbolik Dr. Möhler’s (Hamburg: Friedrich Perthes, 1835). Gladstone’s heavily-annotated copy is preserved at GL. E.20.15. Mozley’s article, published in the January 1847 issue of the Christian Remembrancer, was later reissued as J. B. Mozley, The theory of development a criticism of Dr Newman’s essay on the development of Christian Doctrine (London: Rivingtons, 1878). Gladstone’s diary entry for 8 August 1847 notes that he ‘Wrote on Dev[elopmen]t.’ He read Nitzsch on that and the following day, finishing it and beginning both Mozley and Möhler’s Neue Untersuchungen on 12 August. GD, 3:640-7. 72 Gladstone, untitled draft letter. BL AddMSS 44737, ff. 76-81.

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to trace them upwards from the slightest rudiments, the faintest and most ambiguous

indications, gathered at wide intervals of date, to assert their genealogical relation to primitive

Christianity in spite of presumptions from history.

Only those who adopted the opposing tactic of identity and who had therefore ‘mastered the idea of

the primitive revelation both as a whole and in the relations of its parts’ were in a position to identify

whether there were in fact gaps in doctrine that needed to be bridged; to judge, in other words,

whether we are to conceive of the developed church as bearing the same relation to its

own original form, as the full grown perfect man bears to the earliest embryo, a material

organism capable as we are told of fulfilling the very lowest animal destiny, and by no

intelligible signs marked and determined to a higher one.74

And, once he had reached some sort of conclusion on this unsettled issue the said ‘champion’ would,

Gladstone claimed, find himself no further advanced than the point from which most followers of the

‘identity’ method set out. ‘He has now to construct as it were out of chaos the very ground of his

starting point…’75 Development was ‘self-condemned’: the ‘developed’ doctrine damned the

primitive as requiring ‘reformation’, while the primitive damned the ‘developed’ as a betrayal of its

fundamental principles.76

Newman’s approach to the Maryan doctrines, Gladstone argued, showed that he understood

‘development’ to imply ‘new additions’, rather than the gradual unveiling over time of a body of

pure doctrine given once for all time, the sense in which it had been used by St. Vincent of Lérins

(Vincentius). None of the tests by which Newman proposed to separate true developments from false

worked. Apply the criterion of ‘chronic continuance’ to history, Gladstone wrote, and they broke

down. ‘Is Chartism a legitimate development of Magna Charta?’, Gladstone queried, ‘It is in the

same direction.’ ‘Apply Chronic continuance to Paganism. Mahometanism…the close boroughs in

the British Constitution.’77 All three were self-evidently false developments, but had persisted for a

long period of time. Perhaps the greatest danger was a sort of theological scientism. Newman was, if

perhaps unwittingly, arguing that ‘Christian Theology is a science to be collected like other sciences

from a body of experimental facts and like them to change according to the new lights which new

experience supplies.’78 Religious truth was no longer something that could be felt and known

intuitively at any point in human history, but was something that only became perceptible from afar,

across the span of historical time, something deduced in hindsight, ‘perceived…upon a

comprehensive view of their history and by the application of certain philosophic tests’.79 74 Ibid., f. 266v.75 Ibid., f. 267v.76 Ibid., f. 304v.

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Going even further, Gladstone argued that Newman’s development wasn’t even good natural

science, because there was - Gladstone claimed - no evidence for any self-regulating mechanism

such as might protect an institution like the church from unbalanced or perverted development. What

might at first glance seem to be corrective reactions against unbalanced growth (such as the

Reformation) were not examples of progression by the working of antagonistic forces, but

represented ‘some new evolution [sic] of energy from the centre of life which casts off the system

together with the abuse that has corrupted it, and thus forms a new one for itself, to recommence the

same career of progressive degeneracy.’80 If we may have recourse to terminology drawn from

Victorian evolutionary science - and I think we may - we would conclude that Gladstone is

advancing a degradationist theory of evolution here. Life is evolving, but it is evolving backwards,

from original perfection to evolved degeneracy. As we shall see, this model of evolution would

become surprisingly popular in the years after 1870.

In his unsent letter to Newman Gladstone confessed that he could hardly ‘identify the writer

of your book with you. It is so unlike the work of your mind’.81 Gladstone was forced to conclude

that Newman’s mind had become unbalanced under the pressure of the early 1840s. By publishing

rather than suppressing the product of that crisis, however, Newman made himself responsible for

‘the dilapidation and destruction of Faith among your brethren’.82 Gladstone’s letter breaks off

shortly afterwards. In one sense Gladstone was overreacting. Far from being established ‘within the

pale’ of the Roman Catholic church ‘as at least an authorised and allowed doctrine’ Newman’s

development met with a rather frosty reception from Rome in 1846. Linguistic and other barriers

meant that at the time the Vatican did not accept and possibly did not understand what Newman was

trying to say. It certainly did not exploit it as a powerful ‘weapon’ for the Roman Catholic church.83

III

That Newman claimed to have been thinking in Butlerian spirit while writing the Essay irked

Gladstone. In 1890 Gladstone wrote to Newman’s biographer, Richard Hutton, that there was ‘an

infinity to be said upon the relation of Newman to Butler’, the two greatest ‘theologers’ to have

passed through Oxford since the Reformation. ‘Rightly or wrongly, I have ever since 1843 believed

Newman to be thoroughly unsound as a Butlerian.’84 For all his supposed admiration of Butler,

Newman was ‘no Butlerian’.85 Hutton wrote in his biography that Newman ‘learned from Butler…

that “probability is the guide of life”’. ‘Or rather did not learn’, Gladstone wrote testily in the margin

of his copy.86 Newman’s approach to scripture and in particular the apparent eagerness with which he 81 BL AddMSS 44737, f. 80.82 Ibid., f. 81.83 Chadwick, From Bossuet to Newman, pp. 182-4. BL AddMSS 44736, f. 314.

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pointed out internal inconsistencies in Tract LXXXV anticipated Huxley’s approach in ‘The

Evolution of Theology’ in several respects, pointing out how little scriptural backing there was for

the rites, sacraments and liturgy of all branches of Christianity, including those which insisted on

sola scriptura.87 This smacked of treating scripture as a ‘legal parchment’, of expecting to find

revelation spelled out chapter and verse.

In April 1889 Leslie Stephen drew Huxley’s attention to this tract, and the latter gleefully

seized on the opportunity to recruit Newman in support of his arguments.88 ‘If I were called upon to

compile a Primer of “infidelity”’, Huxley wrote in a footnote to his June 1889 Nineteenth Century

article on ‘Agnosticism and Christianity’, ‘I think I should save myself trouble by making a selection

from these works, and from the “Essay on Development” by the same author.’89 ‘My satisfaction in

making Newman my accomplice has’, he wrote to Joseph Hooker, ‘been unutterable.’90 Strictly

speaking this formed part of a separate querelle Huxley had been pursuing with Henry Wace,

alongside his feud with Gladstone. The aim of his essay, Huxley wrote Knowles, was to ‘hammer in

two big nails’, the second of which was ‘that Newman’s doctrine of “Development” is true to an

extent of which the Cardinal did not dream.’91 Though undoubtledly among Huxley’s more

humourous performances, the essay confirms my view that the Newman of the Essay and the Huxley

of the Nineteenth Century essays could seem remarkably similar in their reasoning, and that

Gladstone was aware of the resemblance. Huxley was dubbed the ‘Pope’ by friends and in his

biography Desmond presents him as bent on creating a highly centralized church scientific

disseminating approved evolutionary dogma and crushing heretics.92 Though Lightman has rightly

pointed out Huxley’s less dogmatic aspects, that side was visible almost exclusively to intimates

(including Charles Kingsley, as noted below).93

The eighteenth-century Anglican theologian Joseph Butler had pointed out that ‘religious

facts’ were neither more nor less likely to be perverted by ‘enthusiasm’ than any other kind of fact,

including ones we would call scientific. This was the message of chapter seven of part two of

Butler’s Analogy of Religion (1736@), the chapter Gladstone considered most relevant to questions

of science and scriptural authority.94 If Revelation was ‘graduated’, then so was Science. In his

61 Newman, Fifteen sermons, p. 317. 62 Newman, Fifteeen sermons, p. 348.66 James Secord, Victorian Sensation: the extraordinary publication, reception and secret authorship of “Vestiges” (London: University of Chicago Press, 2000).73 BL AddMSS 44736, ff. 265-333 (265v).77 Ibid., f. 272v. He was not the only Anglican critic to note that almost any doctrine could successfully run Newman’s gauntlet. Nicholls, ‘Gladstone and the Anglican critics’, p. 139.78 BL AddMSS 44736, f. 269v.79 Ibid., f. 278.84 Gladstone continues, ‘nor am I at all shaken in this opinion by his almost caricature of Bishop Butler’s principle that you quote [gap in manuscript]’ The page number is not given, but the annotations in Gladstone’s copy of Hutton make it clear that he was referring to page 57 of the biography, which was published in 1891. Gladstone to R. H. Hutton, 6 October 1890. Lathbury, Correspondence, 1: 405-407 (407).85 Gladstone to Acton, 1 September 1890, where he calls Newman ‘no Butlerian, though a warm admirer of Butler.’ Ibid., 1:404-405 (404).

15


‘Proem’ Gladstone wondered at ‘the rapidity with which persons of authority have come to treat the

Darwinian hypothesis as having reached the final stage of demonstration’.95 Evolution as a science

was itself work in progress, but men of science had made it into a fetish. In his 1887 Nineteenth

Century articles Argyll had argued that Darwinism had become a creed. Those who would challenge

its dogmas were, he claimed, cowed by a ‘Reign of Terror which had come to be established in the

scientific world under the abuse of a great name [i.e. Darwin]’.96 In an essay entitled ‘A Great

Lesson’ Argyll cited the notorious 1869 episode in which Huxley had mistakenly identified a

precipitate (sulphate of lime) found floating in a sample jar from the HMS Challenger as the

‘protoplasm’, the primordial goo of life. The Bathybius was born.97 This was indeed evidence

supportive of Gladstone’s contention that the coach of biology was moving too fast, and that Huxley

was its Jehu. As Argyll observed ‘The naturalists of the “Challenger” began their voyage in the full

Bathybian faith…Bathybius was accepted because of its supposed harmony with Darwin’s

speculations.’ This was ‘a great lesson on “precipitation”’, but of a kind decidedly unflattering to

Huxley and science. 98

The tide seemed to have turned against Darwinian natural selection. The new ‘science of

energy’ championed by John Tyndall in the 1870s makes it almost impossible for us to distinguish

‘real science’ from ‘pseudosciences’ such as spiritualism in the High Victorian era. I have already

alluded to Wallace’s famous ‘betrayal’ of natural selection in favour of spiritualism.

‘Degradationism’ and Lamarckian use-disuse were potent alternatives to natural selection as engines

of evolution, forcing Darwin to backpedal in later editions of Origin. Seen in this context, Huxley’s

position looks less solid. His personal circumstances were equally challenging. Unlike his older

opponent, Huxley had retired due to ill-health by the time of this querelle - in 1885, when he turned

sixty and Gladstone granted him a civil pension. Although Huxley noted to friends how attacking

Gladstone invigorated him, otherwise the late 1880s found Huxley increasingly isolated. Though

they applauded his spry vigour, the next generation of increasingly specialized men of science saw

little point in fighting ‘ecclesiasticism’ themselves, while those who did appeal to Huxley to lead

them were seeking to erect a new church dedicated to ‘agnosticism’. This fundamental misreading of

the original sense of the term clearly frustrated Huxley.99 Along with the death of his daughter

Marian in November 1887, it caused his view of life in all its senses to darken significantly.

Another strain on Huxley around this time was the widening gap separating him from his

erstwhile friend Herbert Spencer, which became an open breach in December 1889.100 Spencer’s

essays criticizing natural selection appeared in the Nineteenth Century in April and May 1886.101 As

Argyll wrote to Gladstone, they showed how the ‘idolators’ who had misappropriated Darwin’s

theory as the basis of ‘the Mechanical Theory of Creation’ were having to retreat. ‘All this has been

brought about by the gradual recognition of innumerable facts showing that usefulness can[‘]t

account for the origin of a thousand structures’, Argyll crowed, ‘I am delighted to see this breaking

16


up a great imposture - not Darwin’s - but his idolators.’102 In his introduction to Réville Müller called

himself ‘one of the earliest and most outspoken admirers of Darwin’s work’. But Darwin needed to

be defended from being made the tool of ‘that pseudo-philosophical sciolism which tries to put

evolution in the place of history’. While the ‘comprehensive treatment of religions’ might have

‘advantages’ and even provide ‘amusement’, ‘it is simply intolerable in the Science of Religion’.103

Scientistic comparative models were fine in their place (anthropology or psychology, fields Müller

disdained) but had got out of hand - and were now having their sails trimmed.

For all his bulldog ways Huxley was surprisingly willing to concede the limitations of

scientific knowledge, and could even sound like a Butlerian probabilist. This one senses is one of the

reasons Gladstone found him such an infuriating opponent. Huxley certainly seems to consider

himself a Butlerian in an 1860 letter to Charles Kingsley, part of a remarkable correspondence on the

relationship between science and theology. After playfully advancing a theory to explain human

intellectual progress in humans (‘Sportogenesis’) Huxley confessed

I am too much a believer in Butler and in the great principle of the “Analogy” that

“there is no absurdity of Theology so great that you cannot parallel it by a greater

absurdity of nature” - (It is not commonly stated in this way) to have any difficulties

about miracles. I have never had the least sympathy with the a priori reasons against

orthodoxy - and I have by nature and disposition the greatest…antipathy to all the

atheistic and infidel school.104

He saw our universe as a big card game, he explained to Kingsley, ‘by great good fortune the wiser

among us have made out some few of the rules of the game, as at present played - we call these

“laws of nature” and honor them because we find that if we obey them we win something for our

pains.’ The cards were ‘our theories and hypotheses’, and it was ludicrous even to attempt to work

out what matter or the ‘substratum’ of the universe were—as foolish as trying to work out if the

cards being used in the game were ‘made of pasteboard or gold leaf’.105

These views were expressed in private, in the early 1860s. But they are also to be found in

Man’s Place in Nature (1863), where Huxley advanced ‘the doctrine of progressive development’,

but admitted that as yet it remained one among a number of hypotheses (‘rules of the game’)

regularly deployed by men of science:

104 Huxley to Charles Kingsley, 5 May 1863. ICL, Huxley Papers. Gen. Letters IX, f. 216. In an earlier letter, however, Huxley writes that ‘it is no use to talk to me of analogies and probabilities’, which suggests that Huxley’s admiration of Butler was qualified. Huxley to Kingsley, 23 September 1860. Huxley, Life and Letters, 1:216-7. Jane Garnett, ‘Bishop Butler and the Zeitgeist: Butler and the development of Christian moral philosophy in Victorian Britain’, in Christopher Cunliffe, ed., Joseph Butler’s moral and religious thought (Oxford, 1992), pp. 63–96 (75-6).105 Huxley to Charles Kingsley, 22 May 1863. ICL, Huxley Papers. Gen. Letters IX, f. 229. For a fuller discussion of these letters, see White, Huxley, pp. 114-121.

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I adopt Mr. Darwin’s hypothesis, therefore, subject to the production of proof that

physiological species may be produced by selective breeding; just as a physical

philosopher may accept the undulatory [i.e. wave] theory of light, subject to the

proof of the existence of the hypothetical ether; or as the chemist adopts the atomic

theory, subject to the proof of the existence of atoms; and for exactly the same reasons,

namely, that it has an immense amount of primâ facie probability: that it is the

only means at present within reach of reducing the chaos of observed facts to order;

Gladstone graces this passage with not one but two exclamation marks in his copy.106

In both ‘Agnosticism’ (1889) and in his very last Nineteenth Century contribution (March

1895) Huxley described the importance of his early reading of Sir William Hamilton’s essay ‘On the

philosophy of the unconditioned’, as well as his admiration for Hamilton’s disciple Henry Mansel.107

Mansel’s 1858 Bampton Lectures at Oxford had sparked off a two-decade long controversy on the

limits of human knowledge.108 Far from being a creed, for Huxley agnosticism was simply a

convenient label for the truly scientific method of following one’s reason as far as it will go, but

refusing to ‘pretend that conclusions are certain which are not demonstrated or demonstrable’.109

While Huxley claims to be Butlerian, the paradigm in which he located himself has sharp edges; light

on one side, with nothing but utter ‘darkness,’ rather than shades of grey, on the other. On can sense

Gladstone’s frustration with Huxley’s attempt to have his cake and eat it in the marginalia to his copy

of Huxley’s American Addresses (1877). On page two Huxley claims that ‘it has ceased to be

conceivable that chance should have any place in the universe’, while on page three he insists we

‘recollect’ that any human belief is ‘a probable belief…that our widest and safest generalizations are

simply statements of the highest degree of probability.’ Gladstone highlights both passages, notes the

conflict, and adds despairingly ‘Is this then a question of “probability”?’110 Such marginalia suggest

annoyance at Huxley’s oscillation between assertions of fact and concessions of probable

evidence.111

It was as if ‘scientific knowledge’ could be established with a certitude denied to knowledge

of God or anything else. Huxley’s delight in reading Mansel’s lectures (at Charles Lyell’s

suggestion) is, as Lightman has noted, ironic: ‘For whereas Huxley was correct in saying that Mansel

undermined orthodox Christianity, it is equally evident that Mansel undercut the certainty of

science.’112 Though her essay was focussed on Victorian responses to Butler rather than Mansel,

otherwise Jane Garnett account of ‘scientific agnostics’ highlights a similar failing ‘to follow through

the epistemological implications for scientific knowledge’.113 Despite the aforementioned promptings

from Argyll, Huxley also failed to perceive that, like theology, science did have ‘creeds’, that there

were heavy social and professional costs borne by those who had evidence that failed to fit accepted

theories. Coming from a man who had built a career on fighting men of science apparently ‘blind’ to

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inconvenient morphological facts like the hippocampus, this is a breathtaking blindness on Huxley’s

part. Upholding this view of a dogma-free church scientific required Huxley to rewrite his past.114

In the 1870s and 1880s the influence of Tyndall as well as the rise of spiritualism encouraged

a tendency to see matter as force, and the physical universe as suffused with a quasi-electrical

spiritual energy. Christian evolutionists like Kingsley found this an appealing theory.115 As his 1847

memorandum indicates, Gladstone did too. In it Gladstone noted that our senses detect objects by

means of their colour, extension and other qualities. ‘But what is the nexus, what is the substratum of

all these? What is that to which they belong, in which they inhere, on which they depend, by virtue

of which they are what they are?’ He proposed that a divine energy sustained all matter, holding it

‘within the laws of the material creation’ and preventing it from falling back into chaos:

It was spirit that called matter into being: why may it not be spirit that keeps matter in being,

that prevents its annihilation? It was spirit that created: why may it not be spirit that upholds

what it created? There is a true sense, as well as a false and a pantheistic one, in which it may

[ins: nay must] be said that God works in and through all matter. It is by an energy derived

wholly from Him that matter subsists that its properties have impact upon our senses.

Whether that energy continually flows forth from Him; or whether it has been seated, during

His pleasure, in the material order of the world…we cannot be said to know.116

Though a private memorandum, this predates Origin by twelve years, and clearly indicates that

Gladstone’s opposition to Newman and later Huxley was not an opposition to reasoned enquiry into

the origin of life and even matter itself. If anything, he was fighting against them for the right to

speculate more widely than them.

IV

In December 1885 Argyll’s letters to Gladstone were not concerned exclusively with ensuring that

the G.O.M. knew what he was talking about when clashing with Huxley over palaeontology. He was

also writing to urge Gladstone to resist the Vaticanisation of the Liberal Party.

every item of Liberal policy for many years has been taken up under the pressures

and inducement of some Party move. [Here Gladstone has written ‘No’ in the margin]

The ultramontane theory of the ‘Catholic Church’ asserts a Corporate Consciousness

116 BL AddMSS44736, ff. 328 and v.

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which develops Doctrine under Divine Guidance - and all Catholics are to ‘bow’ to its

decrees as new dogmas become ripe for definition. As regards Theology you have

repudiated this Doctrine and denounced it. Yet in Politics you seem to have adopted it,

and your ‘Liberal Party’ comes into a place and authority analogous to that of the Catholic

Church. Rosebery expressed it with beautiful simplicity when he said in some speech

this year - whatever wave of public opinion we see advancing for heaven’s sake let us

be on the crest of it! And this is called leadership!117

Argyll went on to explain that he had left Gladstone’s cabinet in April 1881 (over the Irish Land Bill)

because he felt that the agenda was being set by the party rather than as the result of decisions

reached by Gladstone and his cabinet colleagues. He was worried that Joseph Chamberlain and

Charles Dilke seemed to be in control, even though they insulted Gladstone, while Gladstone’s true

colleagues were being kept in the dark over his ideas for Home Rule. As we have seen, Huxley made

similar charges of pandering to outside opinion during his querelle with Gladstone, referring to ‘the

coach-dog theory of premiership’, which held ‘that the whole duty of a political chief is to look sharp

for the way the social coach is driving, and then run in front and bark loud - as if being the leading

noise-maker and guiding were the same things’.118 ‘If working men were to-day to vote by a majority

that two and two made five’, Huxley commented to Benjamin Waugh, ‘to-morrow Gladstone would

believe it, and find them reasons for it which they had never dreamed of.’119

Gladstone was fully willing to concede that, as a political leader, he was well-versed in the

arts of persuasion, and thus qualified to analyze the rhetorical techniques by which scriptural texts

such as Genesis exerted moral force on those who read or heard them delivered. In Impregnable

Rock he wrote of having spent ‘several scores’ of years in the ‘study of the means of making himself

intelligible to the mass of men’.120 The original audience for Genesis had been ‘humans of childlike

temperament and of unimproved understanding’.121 Huxley had been closely involved in debates over

state education and was shaken by his own experience of the ‘Black Monday’ rioters in February

1886. But it was the sense that Gladstone was exploiting the ‘unimproved understanding’ of today’s

expanded electorate which most disturbed Huxley.122

In the Impregnable Rock Gladstone had proposed a ‘law of relativity’.123 The order of

narration followed in Genesis made sense, he argued, ‘when we acknowledge relativity as the basis

of the narrative’: relativity to the listener’s position, knowledge and comprehension.124 Far from

shattering the argument for a Designer made in Genesis, evolution ‘would both enlarge and confirm

it’, replacing awe at the design of ‘separate constructions’ with awe at the entire scheme by which 118 Huxley, ‘Agnosticism’, 252. In 1895 he coined the term ‘demômism’ (related to a Greek verb meaning ‘to talk popularly’) to express what he considered to be the ‘current teaching’. Huxley, ‘Mr Balfour’s Attack on Agnosticism I’, 531.119 From Waugh’s recollections of his last conversation with Huxley ‘some time in 1887 or 1888’. Huxley, Life and Letters, 1:353. For similar sentiments, see Huxley to Albert Grey, 13 April 1886. Ibid., 2:124-6.

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each and every construction became ‘an indication, and therefore a prediction of all those which

were to succeed.’125 He had put this more clearly in his ‘Proem’:

Evolution is, to me, series with development. And like series in mathematics, whether

arithmetical or geometrical, it establishes in things an unbroken progression; it places

each thing (if only it stand the test of ability to live) in a distinct relation to every other

thing, and makes each a witness to all that have preceded it, a prophecy of all that are

to follow it. It gives to the argument of design, now called the teleological argument, at

once a wider expansion, and an augmented tenacity and solidity of tissue.126

This Christian evolutionism was one he was delighted to find shared by a number of American men

of science, not just James Dwight Dana, but especially Asa Gray, whose works he particularly

admired.127

There was even a sense in which evolution could be seen as one of God’s rhetorical figures.

In his 1847 memo on Vestiges Gladstone noted that:

It may have pleased the almighty to graduate His work and to conduct it through

many stages, in order that He might make it more comprehensible to us, might

establish for us a school of wisdom, with lessons adapted to our feeble powers.

Creation, considered strictly, we may receive as a fact, but we cannot in the smallest

degree comprehend it, and the creation of the rudest particle of a Chaos is as truly and

supremely Divine, as if a simple moment of time had brought all the world and its

inhabitants out of nothing to perfection. But the idea of a Creation in crude forms

followed by their gradual evolution and development under the same hand of God

sustaining His laws of natural order…[opens] a field of study in which that awe is

likewise tempered with delight and with affection as we realise the idea of what

God has done for us by the twofold contemplation of it both as a whole and in its

parts.128

Gladstone criticized the author of Vestiges for suggesting that there were exceptions to the fixed

evolutionary laws had been set down by Providence. Rather than seeking as much room for such

miracles as possible Gladstone resisted anything that might leave believers worshipping what we

today would call a ‘god of the gaps’. As he notes in the same memorandum, ‘Whether at all and if so

how far it is His will to separate as it were physical or moral forces from Himself and give these a

127 See Gladstone to Henry Acland, 20 December 1885. Bodleian Library, Oxford. MS Acland.d.68, f. 76.128 BL, AddMSS 44731, undated memo [1847], f. 74-87 (at f. 76 and v.)

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self acting movement’ was a question that could never be successfully answered, but was in any case

immaterial.129 God’s power was either total, or He did not exist.130 For Gladstone evolution was not

something that eliminated God or devolved his powers to ministering ‘laws’, therefore, but simply a

way of making his creative power more comprehensible to us.

Knowledge and faith were coextensive, partners rather than rivals. Among the heavy

annotations in Gladstone’s copy of Prussian embryologist Ernst Haeckel’s Natural History of

Creation (1876) it is the dictum that ‘Where faith commences, science ends ’ that most draws

Gladstone’s ire. ‘oh no!’ Gladstone wrote in the margin when he re-read it in 1891. Haeckel saw

faith and knowledge as rightfully separate. ‘Faith has its origin in the poetic imagination’ he wrote,

while ‘knowledge…originates in the reasoning intelligence of man.’131 As the species name he gave

to the Bathybius (Bathybius haeckelii) indicated, Huxley was a great admirer of Haeckel. It is

unsurprising, therefore, to find a similar dyad in Huxley’s ‘Evolution of theology’, where we have an

oscillation or tussle between the imagination’s desire to embody ideas and the intellect’s power of

abstraction.132

This fundamental disagreement over the relationship between faith and knowledge threatened

to make the Gladstone-Huxley debate a dialogue of the deaf. The same text (Genesis) could be taken

as evidence for both primitive revelation and a universal stadial model of mytho-poetic evolution. In

the book that started the whole dispute off Réville had argued that in taking Genesis as evidence of a

primitive revelation Gladstone was going against ‘all that we know as to the extremely miserable and

uncultured state of humanity anterior to history’.133 Seen from Réville’s perspective of the ‘science of

religion’ the contrast between the uncivilized or ‘low’ state of humanity around the time Genesis was

composed and the divine (and therefore, Réville assumes, sophisticated) message purportedly

delivered to them by God was itself evidence that a primitive revelation had not happened.

To Gladstone, it was this very contrast between the message and the moral and intellectual

state of the people to whom it was delivered that served as evidence of primitive revelation, and of its

moral necessity. Genesis was, to quote Impregnable Rock, ‘in itself complete and yet insufficient’.134

While both applied their reason, Réville and Gladstone were led to completely different conclusions.

The field for speculation is much broader in Gladstone’s case. Where Réville and Huxley can only

imagine facts being slotted together in a meliorist direction, Gladstone operated with both

degradationist and ‘evolutionary’ (in the popular sense of progressively improving) models. There

are hints at several points that he saw the two as linked, with progress in one regard accompanied by

regression in another. ‘Do you think any man can simply say that the individual human being is

advancing?’, he asked Acland in 1883. ‘I have no doubt he advances in certain respects. But his

gains in one direction may be balanced by his losses in another.’135 As he noted in a private

133 Réville, Prologemena, p. 40.

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memorandum of 1881, it was ‘as if this mixture of progress and recession were for our wayward race

almost a law.’136

The ‘ladder thinking’ or civilisational approach which Réville and Huxley applied to Genesis

presumed that all human cultures passed through the same stages in the same order. Once one had a

snapshot of the cosmogony of a given people one could not only place them in a universal hierarchy

of civilisation, one could also supply (in the imagination) the previous and the subsequent stage.

Huxley’s evolutionary biology was not true discovery, but Kuhnian puzzle solving. Sometimes this

worked, as in the famous example of Huxley successfully predicting (in 1876) that a two-toed fossil

horse or ‘eohippus’ would be found to fill the perceived gap between the ancient three-toed horse

and today’s horses, who run on the nail of one toe.137 At other times, as with the Bathybius, it did not.

As we have seen, Gladstone was happy to accept evolution in a Butlerian spirit, as a reasonable

hypothesis, but he was not going to allow scientists like Huxley apply reductivist models that pruned

the true ‘tree-thinking’ of evolution into a neat espalier, or (as in the case of ‘the science of religion’)

a single ‘ladder’. Whereas Huxley saw only one evolutionary path to polytheism, Gladstone

disagreed. ‘Mankind have travelled not by one but by several roads into polytheism.’138

Henry Acland wrote to Gladstone in 1890 noting that ‘one thing…certain in “Science” [is]

that the Science of today will not be the science of tomorrow.’ 139 Gladstone agreed, and was clearly

alive to the fact that science was itself evolving, just as theology had. Previously theology had

‘domineered over the territory of Science’, he wrote in a memorandum of 1881. Now ‘Scientism

trespasses on the ground belonging to Theology and Philosophy’, and was even seeking to fashion an

‘evolutionary morality’ out of the ‘physical law’ of natural selection.140 What hope there was that the

pendulum might swing back, however, was limited by a second negative development within

science. ‘There is one cause in action over the whole field of knowledge’, Gladstone observed in

1883, ‘which has a powerful tendency to reduce [man’s] dimensions. I mean that we are all coming

to be specialists.’141 This made a recovery unlikely. Both Gladstone and Huxley had attended

meeting of the polymath Metaphysical Society in the 1870s. Indeed, they had heard each other

deliver papers. Unfortunately they seem to have wasted this opportunity to thrash out their very

different models of ‘development’ in the more discreet and intimate atmosphere fostered by that

Society. Huxley paid more attention to the shape of Gladstone’s head than the content of his paper.142

But by the time of their less peaceful encounter in the Nineteenth Century the Society had been dead

for almost a decade, killed not so much by ‘too much love’ (as Huxley claimed), but by the growth of

specialized journals, societies and university departments.

‘Controversy, like most things in this world,’, Huxley wrote in the midst of the querelle, ‘has

a good and a bad side.’

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On the good side, it may be said that it stimulates the wits, tends to clear the mind, and often

helps those engaged in it to get a better grasp of their subject than they had before; while,

mankind being essentially fighting animals, a contest leads the public to interest themselves

in questions to which, otherwise, they would give but a languid attention. On the bad side,

controversy is rarely found to sweeten the temper, and generally tends to degenerate into an

exchange of more or less effective sarcasms.143

The Huxley-Gladstone fight certainly did degenerate into sarcasms. Yet I have argued that even these

attempts at a rather pointed humour were ultimately related to an important question: to religious and

political rhetoric and the possibility of understanding evolutionary Natural Theology as a divine

argument aimed at a mass audience of limited comprehension.

This essay began by noting Gladstone’s relative ignorance of evolution as a science. Seen

from a contemporary perspective that phrase ‘as a science’ might seem tautological. But it in fact

takes us to the heart of Gladstone’s reading of Huxley and his fellow men of science. For Gladstone

evolution was not a scientific law or even a process, but a tool for reasoning on all fields of human

knowledge. And more than that. It was a tool for reasoning on human faith. Seen in this way, as a

tool or servant of humanity, there was little for Gladstone to fear from development. Unfortunately

Newman and Huxley had claimed this tool as the exclusive property of one institution, one branch of

science. The tool became a ‘weapon’. Its universal applicability made it a powerful one: for now to

apply it outside natural science was to claim that territory for natural science. While Gladstone found

88 Bernard Lightman, The Origins of Agnosticism: Victorian unbelief and the limits of knowledge (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1987), p. 114.89 Huxley, ‘Agnosticism and Christianity’ in Collected Works, Science and Christian Tradition ESSAYS@, @:333.90 Huxley to Joseph Hooker, 30 May 1889. Huxley, Life and Letters, 2:226.91 Huxley to Knowles, 14 April 1889. Huxley, Life and Letters, 2:225.92 Desmond, Huxley: evolution’s high priest.93 Lightman, Origins of Agnosticism, ch. 5.99 White, Huxley, p. 139; Desmond, Huxley: evolution’s high priest, p. 190; Bernard Lightman, ‘Huxley and scientific agnosticism: the strange history of a failed rhetorical strategy’, British Journal of the History of Science, 35 (2002), 271-89.100 Huxley to Spencer, 9-10 December 1889. ICL, Huxley Papers. Gen. Letters VII, f. 244ff.101 These essays on ‘The factors of organic evolution’ were published as a separate pamphlet in 1887. 106 Huxley, Evidence as to man’s place in nature (London: Williams and Norgate, 1863), p. 108. GL. K13/2. 107 Huxley, ‘Agnosticism’, 235-6. Huxley claims that when he read Mansel’s Limits of Religious Thought ‘I said to myself “Connu!”; and…discovered that, in the matter of Agnosticism (not yet so christened), I was as orthodox as a dignity of the Church, who might any day be made a bishop’. Huxley, ‘Mr Balfour’s Attack on Agnosticism I’, NC (March 1895), 527-40 (534).108 Lightman, Origins of Agnosticism, ch. 2.109 Huxley, ‘Agnosticism’, 246.110 ‘But see p3’ he writes next to the p. 2 passage, and ‘cf p.2’ next to that on p. 3. Huxley, American Addresses, pp. 2-3. GL. K13/7. GD, 9: 390.111 In addition to that instance noted above (note 107) Gladstone puts no less than four exclamation marks next to similar references by Huxley to the provisional status of the Darwinian hypothesis, as well as his denial that he (Huxley) is an ‘advocate for Mr Darwin’s, or any other views’ (p. 107). Huxley, Evidence as to man’s place in nature (London: Williams and Norgate, 1863), p. 108. GL. K13/2. Gladstone underlines Huxley’s statement (lower down on the same page) that ‘I can see no excuse for doubting that all are co-ordinated terms of Nature’s great progression, from the

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a ‘question of probability’ in Huxley’s anthropology, Huxley found a ‘question of anthropology’ in

Gladstone’s theology.

To see this simply as a turf war between natural science and theology is therefore to miss

something important. The Gladstone/Huxley debate did not end in the triumph of a professional,

scientific evolutionist over a non-scientific, Creationist dilettante. At its heart lay the relative

authority of knowledge, belief and opinion. Gladstone’s thought on evolution appears striking for

two reasons. Behind the self-confessed layman is an Anglican who had been engaging with

development since the 1840s. Rather than being heroic in defeat, Gladstone’s insistence on the

congruence of science and theology was widely supported in late Victorian Britain. Parallels with the

cult of “force” propounded by the physicist John Tyndall (Huxley’s best friend) as well as with the

positions of statesmen such as the Marquis of Salisbury and A. J. Balfour (both Conservatives, rather

than Liberals) could easily be drawn. The Liberal statesman’s response to Huxley’s scientism was

thus of its time, as well as being the product of long, intense personal gestation. It takes us to the

heart of Victorian concepts of knowledge and its limits.

formless to the formed - from the inorganic to the organic - from blind force to conscious intellect and will.’ Other marginalia note how Huxley’s famous frontispiece showing apes and men standing in a rising line is contradicted by the author’s repeated observations that Orangs never walk upright. Ibid., frontis., pp. 37, 42, 43, 49.112 Lightman, Origins of Agnosticism, p. 9.115 See Kingsley to Huxley, [23 May 1863]. ICL, Huxley Papers. Gen. Letters IX, f. 235.117 Argyll to Gladstone, 18 December 1885. BL AddMSS 44106, f. 64.120 Gladstone, Impregnable Rock, p. 56.121 Ibid., p. 48.122 Desmond, Huxley: evolution’s high priest, p. 166. 123 Gladstone, Impregnable Rock, p. 71.126 Gladstone, ‘Proem to Genesis’, 18.131 Ernst Haeckel, The History of creation: or the development of the earth and its inhabitants by the action of natural causes trans. E. Ray Lankester (2 vols., London: Henry S. King, 1876), 1:9. GL. K13/6. Gladstone records reading this twice, 24 September 1874 (around the time of the Metaphysical Society sessions he attended) and 13-14 December 1891 (Huxley querelle). He seems to have rubbed out his margin notes from the 1874 reading. The marginalia cited here can therefore be dated to 1891, with the 1874 marginalia visible as faint lines. GL. K13/6. GD, 10:266; 12: 425. He read Haeckel’s Anthropogenie (1874) in Cologne in 1874. Ibid., 8: 528.132 Huxley on tension between abstraction and idol @134 Gladstone, Impregnable Rock, @.

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80 Ibid., f. 299v.86 Richard Hutton, Cardinal Newman (London: Methuen and Co., 1891), p. 20. GL. I/56.6/8.87 [J. H. Newman], ‘Lectures on the Scripture Proof of the Doctrines of the Church’, Tracts for the Times 85 (London: Gilbert and Rivington, 1838), p. 29.94 Gladstone, Impregnable Rock, p. 254. 95 Gladstone, ‘Proem to Genesis’, 18.96 Argyll, ‘Professor Huxley on Canon Liddon’, NC 121 (March 1887), 321-339 (339). Gladstone thought this ‘excellent’. Entry for 27 February 1887. GD, 12:15. Huxley dismissed the idea of a ‘Reign of Terror’ in ‘Science and Pseudo-science’, but admitted that disciples of a new theory might have got carried away (and might even leave him behind), something Argyll picked up on in his rebuttal, ‘Science falsely so called. A reply’, NC 123 (May 1887), 771-774 and in ‘A Great Lesson’, NC127 (September 1887), 293-309. In seeking to come to Gladstone’s aid Argyll had started up two further debates with Huxley: this one on the history of Darwinian science, and another on the Biblical deluge. See Huxley, Life and Letters, 2:159-161.97 See also the passages on the debate between evolutionary biology and physicists over the age of the earth highlighted in Gladstone’s copy of Huxley, American Addresses, pp. 92-3. GL. K13/7. These passages see Huxley taking a very relaxed, almost indifferent view on the implications of Lord Kelvin’s findings (later disproved), which radically curtailed the amount of time available for life to evolve. Huxley’s blasé attitude seems defensive, in so far as Kelvin’s discoveries were perceived as a serious challenge by his colleagues, necessitating the development of other ‘laws of evolution’ (working alongside, or instead of, natural selection) to speed up the process so that it could fit the shorter timescale.98 Argyll, ‘A Great Lesson’, NC127 (September 1887), 293-309 (308). See also Argyll, The Unity of Nature (London: Alexander Strahan, 1884), pp. 34-5. Gladstone highlighted this passage in his copy and cheekily added a heading for it in the index (p. 568) under ‘Scientists, their besetting infirmity’. GL. E35/9. In his response Huxley disingenuously claimed that ‘Up to this moment I was not aware of the universal favour with which Bathybius was received’. Huxley, ‘Science and the bishops’, NC 129 (November 1887), 625-41 (638-9). Desmond, Huxley: the devil’s disciple (London: Michael Joseph, 1994), pp. 367-8.102 Argyll to Gladstone, 12 August 1886. BL AddMSS 44106, f. 144 and v. See also Argyll, ‘Professor Huxley on Canon Liddon’, 338.103 Réville, Prolegomena, ix.113 Garnett, ‘Bishop Butler’, p. 77.114 He would later claim in the Nineteenth Century that there had been nothing stopping him or others supporting Darwin in 1859, that journals, societies and the scientific establishment would never have ‘howled down’ or ‘thought the worse of’ anyone who did so. As both an account of the events around the publication of Origin and as a description of the scientific climate of his own day this was questionable. Huxley, ‘Agnosticism and Christianity’, NC (June 1889), 963-4.124 Ibid., p. 67.125 Ibid., p. 216.129 Ibid., f. 80.130 Ibid., f. 78v.135 Gladstone to Henry Acland, 29 October 1883. Bodleian Library, Oxford MS Acland.d.68, f. 66.136 Gladstone, untitled memo, 1881. BL AddMSS 44765, f. 132.137 Desmond, Huxley: evolution’s high priest, pp. 99-10, 103-4.138 Gladstone, Impregnable Rock, p. 78.139 Henry Acland to Gladstone, 17 March 1890. Bodleian Library, Oxford. MS Acland.d.68, f. 135.140 Gladstone, ‘Ph.’, memoranda dated 15 and 18 December 1881. BL AddMSS 44766, f. 184 (scientism) and 194 (morality).141 Gladstone to Henry Acland, 29 October 1883. Bodleian Library, Oxford MS Acland.d.68, f. 66.142 Desmond, Huxley: evolution’s high priest, p. 84.143 Huxley, ‘Agnosticism and Christianity’, 937.

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Pigs Might Fly: Gladstone, Huxley and the Debate over Evolution