6 Thomas Henry Huxley Quotes on Criticism

Thomas Henry Huxley quotes on criticism

36. Since Lord Brougham assailed Dr Young, the world has seen no such specimen of the insolence of a shallow pretender to a Master in Science as this remarkable production, in which one of the most exact of observers, most cautious of reasoners, and most candid of expositors, of this or any other age, is held up to scorn as a 'flighty' person, who endeavours 'to prop up his utterly rotten fabric of guess and speculation,' and whose 'mode of dealing with nature' is reprobated as 'utterly dishonourable to Natural Science.' And all this high and mighty talk, which would have been indecent in one of Mr. Darwin's equals, proceeds from a writer whose want of intelligence, or of conscience, or of both, is so great, that, by way of an objection to Mr. Darwin's views, he can ask, 'Is it credible that all favourable varieties of turnips are tending to become men?'; who is so ignorant of paleontology, that he can talk of the 'flowers and fruits' of the plants of the Carboniferous epoch; of comparative anatomy, that he can gravely affirm the poison apparatus of the venomous snakes to be 'entirely separate from the ordinary laws of animal life, and peculiar to themselves'... Nor does the reviewer fail to flavour this outpouring of preposterous incapacity with a little stimulation of the odium theologicum. Some inkling of the history of the conflicts between Astronomy, Geology, and Theology, leads him to keep a retreat open by the proviso that he cannot 'consent to test the truth of Natural Science by the word of Revelation;' but, for all that, he devotes pages to the exposition of his conviction that Mr. Darwin's theory 'contradicts the revealed relation of the creation to its Creator,' and is 'inconsistent with the fulness of his glory.' If I confine my retrospect of the reception of the 'Origin of Species' to a twelvemonth, or thereabouts, from the time of its publication, I do not recollect anything quite so foolish and unmannerly as the Quarterly Review article...

70. 'My good and kind agent for the propagation of the Gospel; i.e. the Devil's gospel'.

72. 'Huxley gave the death-blow not only to Owen's theory of the skull but also to Owen's hitherto unchallenged prestige'

73. 'Pope Huxley' title of an article by R.H. Hutton who complains that whilst THH advocates agnosticism for everyone else, he's apt to be a mite too certain himself!

74. 'If he [THH] has a fault it is... that like Caesar, he is ambitious... [it might be said that] cutting up apes is his forte, cutting up men is his foible'

77. 'A man who was always taking two irons out of the fire and putting three in'