The “History” of Victorian Scientific Naturalism: Huxley, Spencer and the “End” of natural history

• Examines the different responses of T. H. Huxley and Herbert Spencer to the end of natural history.
• Spencer wanted to create a new intellectual system based on evolution.
• Spencer supported organic holism.
• Huxley wanted to create a new scientific discipline, biology.
• He supported methodological mechanistic materialism.

As part of their defence of evolutionary theory, T. H. Huxley and Herbert Spencer argued that natural history was no longer a legitimate scientific discipline. They outlined a secularized concept of life from biology to argue for the validity of naturalism. Despite their support for naturalism, they offered two different responses to the decline of natural history. Whereas Huxley emphasized the creation of a biological discipline, and all that that entailed, Spencer was more concerned with constructing an entire intellectual system based on the idea of evolution. In effect, Spencer wanted to create a new scientific worldview based on evolutionary theory. This had consequences for their understanding of human history, especially of how science had evolved through the ages. It affected their conceptions of human agency, contingency, and directionality in history. Examining Huxley's and Spencer's responses to the “end” of natural history reveals some of the deep divisions within scientific naturalism and the inherent problems of naturalism in general. Whereas Huxley chose to separate the natural and the historical, Spencer opted to fuse them into a single system.