140 Harrison
tion of the disparate facts related to the origins of species: “The line of
argument often pursued throughout my theory is to establish a point as a
probability by induction, and to apply it as a hypothesis to other points,
and see whether it will solve them.”^110 Darwin’s break with Baconianism
led to the charge that his theory of evolution by natural selection was
“unscientifi c”—a claim that was true if Bacon’s standards were to be up-
held.^111 The acceptance of Darwin’s theory thus depended on a revision of
the criteria for what constituted a proper use of the inductive method.
Darwin refashioned the methods of natural history by modifying
Baconian notions of induction, while at the same time enabling a new
conception of the sciences that included the study of the natural world
without recourse to theistic explanations. Admittedly, natural selection
was, from the fi rst, a controversial mechanism for biological change. But it
is signifi cant that from the time of the publication of On the Origin of Spe-
cies, proposed alternative mechanisms were themselves almost invariably
nontheistic.^112 The fi rst generation of Darwinians sought a new alliance of
the sciences united by, amongst other things, a common naturalism. The
agenda of “Darwin’s bulldog,” Thomas Huxley (1825–1895) was to excise
theology from natural history and thus to render it more like physics or
astronomy. His was a conception of the unity of the sciences in which the
cost of admission for the study of nature was the exorcising of its theo-
logical demons. His colleague John Tyndall (1820–1893) expressed the
same desire to “wrest from theology the entire domain of cosmological
theory” and at the same time, presumably, to wrest natural history from
the hands of the clergy, who for so long had been among its major ex-
ponents.^113 Thus sacred history and natural theology, having introduced
dynamic and unifying elements into natural history, were unceremoni-
ously bade farewell. An important element of this transformation was
to do with the identity of practitioners of natural history. For much of
the nineteenth century, natural history was conducted, as it had been in
the preceding two centuries, by nonprofessionals—among them a dis-
proportionate number of members of the clergy. Huxley once wrote of
his concern for a proposed research fund that it be “a scientifi c fund and
not a mere naturalists’ fund,” explaining that “the word ‘naturalist’ un-
fortunately includes a far lower order of men than chemist, physicist, or
mathematician... every fool who can make bad species and worse genera
is a ‘Naturalist.’”^114 It was Huxley’s intention to make the study of nature
“scientifi c” by establishing its independence from clerical dominance,
and legitimising a new set of nonecclesiastical authorities.^115 “Science”
was argued to be an activity that excluded theology, and a postfacto justi-
fi cation for the expulsion of theology from natural history was achieved