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The Lights of the Church and the Light of Science By: Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895) |
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ESSAY 6 FROM "SCIENCE AND HEBREW TRADITION"
By Thomas Henry Huxley There are three ways of regarding any account of past occurrences,
whether delivered to us orally or recorded in writing. The narrative may be exactly true. That is to say, the words, taken in
their natural sense, and interpreted according to the rules of grammar,
may convey to the mind of the hearer, or of the reader an idea precisely
correspondent with one which would have remained in the mind of a
witness. For example, the statement that King Charles the First was
beheaded at Whitehall on the 30th day of January 1649, is as exactly
true as any proposition in mathematics or physics; no one doubts that
any person of sound faculties, properly placed, who was present at
Whitehall throughout that day, and who used his eyes, would have seen
the King's head cut off; and that there would have remained in his mind
an idea of that occurrence which he would have put into words of the
same value as those which we use to express it. Or the narrative may be partly true and partly false. Thus, some
histories of the time tell us what the King said, and what Bishop Juxon
said; or report royalist conspiracies to effect a rescue; or detail the
motives which induced the chiefs of the Commonwealth to resolve that
the King should die. One account declares that the King knelt at a high
block, another that he lay down with his neck on a mere plank. And
there are contemporary pictorial representations of both these modes of
procedure. Such narratives, while veracious as to the main event,
may and do exhibit various degrees of unconscious and conscious
misrepresentation, suppression, and invention, till they become hardly
distinguishable from pure fictions. Thus, they present a transition
to narratives of a third class, in which the fictitious element
predominates. Here, again, there are all imaginable gradations, from
such works as Defoe's quasi historical account of the Plague year,
which probably gives a truer conception of that dreadful time than any
authentic history, through the historical novel, drama, and epic, to
the purely phantasmal creations of imaginative genius, such as the old
"Arabian Nights" or the modern "Shaving of Shagpat." It is not strictly
needful for my present purpose that I should say anything about
narratives which are professedly fictitious. Yet it may be well,
perhaps, if I disclaim any intention of derogating from their value,
when I insist upon the paramount necessity of recollecting that there is
no sort of relation between the ethical, or the aesthetic, or even
the scientific importance of such works, and their worth as historical
documents. Unquestionably, to the poetic artist, or even to the student
of psychology, "Hamlet" and "Macbeth" may be better instructors than
all the books of a wilderness of professors of aesthetics or of moral
philosophy. But, as evidence of occurrences in Denmark, or in
Scotland, at the times and places indicated, they are out of court;
the profoundest admiration for them, the deepest gratitude for their
influence, are consistent with the knowledge that, historically
speaking, they are worthless fables, in which any foundation of reality
that may exist is submerged beneath the imaginative superstructure. At present, however, I am not concerned to dwell upon the importance
of fictitious literature and the immensity of the work which it has
effected in the education of the human race. I propose to deal with the
much more limited inquiry: Are there two other classes of consecutive
narratives (as distinct from statements of individual facts), or only
one? Is there any known historical work which is throughout exactly
true, or is there not? In the case of the great majority of histories
the answer is not doubtful: they are all only partially true. Even those
venerable works which bear the names of some of the greatest of ancient
Greek and Roman writers, and which have been accepted by generation
after generation, down to modern times, as stories of unquestionable
truth, have been compelled by scientific criticism, after a long battle,
to descend to the common level, and to confession to a large admixture
of error... Continue reading book >>
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