Moving Knowledge

Huxley's lectures, as the last chapter has shown, were not primarily concerned with closed structures of knowledge, but with open-ended processes of learning. More precisely, Huxley sought to give advice on how one is supposed to draw noticeable and reproducible ‘sense images’ out of a field of practical intervention and trial. He saw these images as apprehensions of meaningful relations which would allow students to translate their (first person) perception into, or recognise it as, a form of (social) communication, such as a diagram or a written text. As we have seen, for Huxley, this activity of extending and converting modes of sensual perception into structures of ideal conception is not to be seen as a division of the aesthetic from the scientific. Rather, it is seen as a way of prolonging the perceptual (or personal) into the intellectual (or impersonal) and, conversely, of checking the intellectual by means of the perceptual. In short, what Huxley had in mind is a mutual interplay of what he called the ‘aesthetic’ and the ‘intellectual’ faculties, each informing the other.

Thus, Huxley's writings register a concern with experimentation and the scientific method that variously resonates with other texts of the period, both fictional and non-fictional. For example, the many half-mad scientists and maladroit scholars peopling the Victorian novel may be taken to show that there was a widespread awareness of the danger of wrongheadedly taking leave of one's senses, a danger which was seen to be inherent in the progress from the personal towards the general. One of these scientists on the verge of going mad is Dr Benjulia in Wilkie Collins's late novel Heart and Science in which, as the title indicates, the relationship between the ‘hard’ and the ‘soft’ takes centre stage. For Benjulia, the scientific method is no more than a vehicle for attaining an ideal end, namely knowledge, for the sake of which he is willing to sacrifice his very ability to be affected by whatever might interfere with his predetermined course. ‘Have I no feeling, as you call it?’, he asks his brother (as much as himself) at one point.