Thomas Henry Huxley

"... En c l brant les m rites philosophiques de Hume, M. Huxley ne fait d'ailleurs qu'ac-quitter une dette de l' cole laquelle il appartient. Les philosophes anglais de ce temps, et notamment Stuart Mill, n'ont pas assez dit ce qu'ils devaient Hume; ils n'ont pas assez d clar soit les emprunts volontaires qu'ils lui ont faits, soit les rapports naturels qui les unissent lui. Il tait de toute justice que cette omission f t r par e. Il s'est trouv que, sans avoir fait de physiologie, par la seule analyse de la pens e, Hume a construit une psychologie ph nom nale, une psychologie sans me, qui s'adapte merveille aux conclusions du positivisme anglais et de la physiologie contemporaine. M. Huxley et la plupart de ses compatriotes, on le sait, semblent vouloir donner des pr misses mat rialistes une conclusion id aliste..."

Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895) was one of the intellectual giants of Victorian England. Initially a surgeon by training, he became the principal exponent of Darwinism and popularizer of "scientific naturalism." His public advocacy of evolution, the voice he gave to science as a dignified and vital profession, the powerful offices he held in its societies, and the many volumes he published of and about science made Huxley among the most influential of all nineteenth-century figures in the history of science. Huxley was a prolific essayist, and his writings put him at the center of intellectual debate in England during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Alan P. Barr's edition of The Major Prose of Thomas Henry Huxley fills a very real and pressing chasm in history of science books, bringing together almost all of Huxley's major nontechnical prose, including Man's Place in Nature and both "Evolution in Ethics" and its "Prolegomena."