Thomas Henry Huxley
Known as "Darwin's Bulldog", he played an important role in the public debates about Darwinism. He also gave many public lectures to laymen. Huxley learned medicine and matured as a naturalist, having similar experineces as Darwin's (Huxley surveyed New Guinea and Australia on the frigate HMS Rattlesnake, during 1846-1850). Unlike Darwin or Francis Galton, Huxley supported his living by teaching science, thus becoming a "scientist" in the narrow sense of the word created in the 19th century. And he became a powerful spokesman of this new, rising specialist.
His view in Man's Place in Nature (1863) is in some respects quite sililar to Darwin's view, since he insists that there is no structural line of demarcation, both in physiological and psychical aspects, between man and apes. However, he reassures, at the same time, that there is a vast gulf between man and the brutes, because of man's ability of rational speech and language. His view on this respect seems to go back to more traditional opinion in his Romanes Lecture Evolution and Ethics (1893); he separates man's morality sharply from the Nature; and he declares that we have to fight against the cosmic process by means of our morality.
Whether or not we agree with this view, his considerations on the relationship between evolution and ethics (Huxley was against evolutionary ethics and Eugenics) are still important.
See my Darwinism and Ethics (Japanese), sect. 7; The Huxley File (Clark University) is a very good site on Huxley.
BACK TO HUXLEY PICTURE//BACK TO HUXLEY PICTURE 2