Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley — Volume 3Huxley, Thomas Henry
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Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley — Volume 3
Huxley, Thomas Henry
Huxley, Thomas Henry, 1825-1895; Naturalists -- England -- Biography
He at once became extremely animated, and spoke of it as those who have
read his criticisms, published in the following month, would expect.]
"You need not lend me that. I have exercised my mind with it a good
deal already. Mr. Balfour ought to have acquainted himself with the
opinions of those he attacks. One has no objection to being abused for
what one DOES hold, as I said of Erasmus; at least, one is prepared to
put up with it. An attack on us by some one who understood our position
would do all of us good--myself included. But Mr. Balfour has acted
like the French in 1870: he has gone to war without any ordnance maps,
and without having surveyed the scene of the campaign. No human being
holds the opinions he speaks of as 'Naturalism.' He is a good debater.
He knows the value of a word. The word 'Naturalism' has a bad sound and
unpleasant associations. It would tell against us in the House of
Commons, and so it will with his readers. 'Naturalism' contrasts with
'supernaturalism.' He has not only attacked us for what we don't hold,
but he has been good enough to draw out a catechism for 'us wicked
people,' to teach us what we MUST hold."
[It was rather difficult to get him to particulars, but we did so by
degrees. He said], "Balfour uses the word phenomena as applying simply
to the outer world and not to the inner world. The only people his
attack would hold good of would be the Comtists, who deny that
psychology is a science. They may be left out of account. They advocate
the crudest eighteenth-century materialism. All the empiricists, from
Locke onwards, make the observation of the phenomena of the mind itself
quite separate from the study of mere sensation. No man in his senses
supposes that the sense of beauty, or the religious feelings [this with
a courteous bow to a priest who was present], or the sense of moral
obligation, are to be accounted for in terms of sensation, or come to
us through sensation." [I said that, as I understood it, I did not
think Mr. Balfour supposed they would acknowledge the position he
ascribed to them, and that one of his complaints was that they did not
work out their premises to their logical conclusions. I added that so
far as one of Mr. Balfour's chief points was concerned--the existence
of the external world--Mill was almost the only man on their side in
this century who had faced the problem frankly, and he had been driven
to say that all men can know is that there are "permanent possibilities
of sensation." He did not seem inclined to pursue the question of an
external world, but said that though Mill's "Logic" was very good,
empiricists were not bound by all his theories.
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