Lectures and Essays

Thomas Huxley earned the nickname "Darwin's bulldog" not from his own choice but from the ferocity with which he defended evolution in the public arena during the 1860s. These lectures and essays, drawn from the most pugilistic decade of his career, are the prose of a professional anatomist who has decided that the public understanding of science is too important to be left to other people.

The collection ranges across Huxley's chief preoccupations: the Lectures on Evolution (three talks given in New York in 1876 that became the standard popular introduction to Darwin's theory), the famous essay "On the Physical Basis of Life" (which scandalised half the scientific community by suggesting that life was a chemical phenomenon), "Naturalism and Supernaturalism," the polemical exchanges with Gladstone over the question of biblical credibility, and the late essays "Agnosticism" and "Agnosticism and Christianity" in which Huxley coined the word "agnostic" and laid out what intellectual honesty about religious questions actually requires.

The prose has the muscular forward motion of Victorian polemic at its best. Huxley's sentences are designed to land. They retain the wit and the controlled fury of a thinker who believed that the duty of a public intellectual was to say, with great clarity, what was true, even when the truth made his audience uncomfortable. To read these essays now is to see the modern scientific worldview arriving in English prose for the first time, fully formed and ready for argument.