Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 75.djvu/507

Rh taking, towards any doctrine or movement, any attitude intermediate between contemptuous hostility and ardent partizanship. Full advantage, moreover, had been taken, by the eminent scientists who were also champions of religious orthodoxy, of the faults of Chambers's book; they contrived very successfully to put about the impression that to be a "Vestigiarian" was to be "unscientific" and sentimental and absurd. These were three qualities which Huxley would have been peculiarly averse to being charged with. Finally, he seems to have been exasperated most of all by a single loose piece of phraseology that now and then recurs in the "Vestiges." Chambers, namely, was prone to speak of "laws" as if they were causes and, more particularly, as if they were secondary causes to which the "Divine Will" delegated its agency and control. To Huxley, from the beginning of his career, this hypostatizing fashion of referring to "laws of nature" was a bête noire; and in 1887 we still find him pursuing the author of the "Vestiges" with ridicule because of his "pseudo-scientific realism." He, therefore, in 1854, almost outdid the Edinburgh Review in the ferocity of his onslaught upon the layman who had ventured to put forward sweeping generalizations upon biological questions while