As regards protoplasm in relation to Professor Huxley's essay On the physical basis of life / by James Hutchinson Stirling.

  • Stirling James Hutchison, 1820-1909.
Date:
1869
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: As regards protoplasm in relation to Professor Huxley's essay On the physical basis of life / by James Hutchinson Stirling. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    currently considered the characteristic and distinctive opinion of that whole perverted or inverted reaction which has been called the Eevidston. That Ls to say, to give this word a moment's explanation, tliat the Vol- taii'es and Humes and Gibbons having long enjoyed an immunity of sneer at man's blind pride and wretched superstition—at his silly non-natural honour and her silly non-natural vu'tue—a reaction had set in. exulting in poetry, in the splendour of nature, the nobleness of man, and the purity of M'oman, from which reaction again we have, almost within the last decennium, been revulsively, as it were, called back,—shall we say by some bolder spirits—the Buckles, the Mills, &c.]—to the old illumination or enlightenment of a lumdred vears ago, in regard to the weakness and stupidity' of man's pretensions over the animality and materiality that lunit him. Of this revulsion, then, a.s said, a main feature, especially in England, has been prostration before the A'ast bulk of Comte; and so it was tliat Mr Huxley's protest in this reference, considering the ])hilosophy ho professed, had that in it to suq^rise at lirst. -But if there was surprise, there M%as also pleasure : for J\[r Huxley's estimate of Comte is undoulitodly the right one. So far as I am conoernod, he s;iys, the most reverend prelate (tlie Archbishop of York) might dialectioally liew M. ( omte in jneces as a modem Agag, and I sliould not atteni]it to stay his liand ; for, .*o far as my study of wliat specially (diaracterisos the Positive philosojdiy lias led me. I find therein little or nothing of any .scientific value, and a great deal which is as thor- oughly antagonistic to the vi ry e.-v^once of science as any- thing in idtramiintane Catholicism. It wa.*? enough,