Darwiniana : Essays — Volume 02Huxley, Thomas Henry
Science
Darwiniana : Essays — Volume 02
Huxley, Thomas Henry
Darwin, Charles, 1809-1882; Evolution (Biology)
Secondly. "The reflection upon our sensations and perceptions, and asking
what they are and why they are.--Reason."
To the faculty defined in the last sentence, the Reviewer, without
assigning the least ground for thus departing from both common usage and
technical propriety, applies the name of reason. But if man is not to be
considered a reasoning being, unless he asks what his sensations and
perceptions are, and why they are, what is a Hottentot, or an Australian
"black-fellow"; or what the "swinked hedger" of an ordinary agricultural
district? Nay, what becomes of an average country squire or parson? How
many of these worthy persons who, as their wont is, read the _Quarterly
Review_, would do other than stand agape, if you asked them whether they
had ever reflected what their sensations and perceptions are and why they
are?
So that if the Reviewer's new definition of reason be correct, the majority
of men, even among the most civilised nations, are devoid of that supreme
characteristic of manhood. And if it be as absurd as I believe it to be,
then, as reason is certainly not self-consciousness, and since it, as
certainly, is one of the "actions to which the nervous system ministers,"
we must, if the Reviewer's classification is to be adopted, seek it among
those four faculties which he allows animals to possess. And thus, for the
second time, he really surrenders, while seeming to defend, his position.
The Quarterly Reviewer, as we have seen, lectures the evolutionists upon
their want of knowledge of philosophy altogether. Mr. Mivart is not less
pained at Mr. Darwin's ignorance of moral science. It is grievous to him
that Mr. Darwin (and _nous autres_) should not have grasped the
elementary distinction between material and formal morality; and he lays
down as an axiom, of which no tyro ought to be ignorant, the position that
"acts, unaccompanied by mental acts of conscious will directed towards the
fulfilment of duty," are "absolutely destitute of the most incipient degree
of real or formal goodness."
Now this may be Mr. Mivart's opinion, but it is a proposition which really
does not stand on the footing of an undisputed axiom. Mr. Mill denies it in
his work on Utilitarianism. The most influential writer of a totally
opposed school, Mr. Carlyle, is never weary of denying it, and upholding
the merit of that virtue which is unconscious; nay, it is, to my
understanding, extremely hard to reconcile Mr. Mivart's dictum with that
noble summary of the whole duty of man--"Thou shalt love the Lord thy God
with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength; and
thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." According to Mr. Mivart's
definition, the man who loves God and his neighbour, and, out of sheer love
and affection for both, does all he can to please them, is, nevertheless,
destitute of a particle of real goodness.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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