Science, Pseudoscience, and Science Falsely So- Called 291Darwinism. After a reply by Campbell, Huxley penned a second article
simply called “Science and Pseudo- Science,” to which the duke responded
with an essay entitled “Science Falsely So Called.” All these appeared in
the British magazine The Nineteenth Century. Huxley’s contributions were
reprinted across the Atlantic in the Popular Science Monthly; his second
article was additionally reprinted in the Eclectic Magazine.^37 The primary is-
sue in this exchange was the status of natural law and its relationship with
the divine. The Duke of Argyll claimed that natural laws were directly or-
dained and enforced by God. To Huxley, by contrast, any suggestion that
the uniformity of natural law implied the existence of divine providence
was illegitimate and pseudoscientifi c.
Huxley, however, was in the minority. Many practicing men of sci-
ence were wary of supernatural interference in the natural world by the
late 1800s, but few of them used the term “pseudoscience” to tar such
belief. Instead, the vast majority of cries of pseudoscience came from the
opponents of evolution. One author in the conservative Catholic World
depicted the Huxleys, Tyndalls, and Darwins of the world as the “mod-
ern Cyclops, who in forging their pseudo- sciences examine nature, but
only with one eye.”^38 Other defenders of orthodox science and traditional
religion, Catholic and Protestant, decried the “materialistic or pseudo-
scientifi c skepticism of the day” or denounced the “pseudo- scientifi c sect”
of Darwinian evolutionists.^39 Sometimes, antievolutionists refi ned their
attacks by equating the pseudoscientifi c nature of evolution with “foreign
tendencies which are alien from science or philosophy,” including mate-
rialism and atheism.^40 Other critics sometimes claimed, without convinc-
ing evidence, that evolution did not meet the approval of most men of
science, or at least the most prominent ones, thereby invoking a sense of
orthodoxy for their cause.
Between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the mech-
anisms both for enforcing and communicating orthodoxy in scientifi c
matters grew to new heights in the United States and in Britain. Graduate
training, specialized journals, and membership in exclusive organizations
all helped to establish a substratum of agreed- upon practices, facts, and
concepts that most scientists learned to share. The increased professional-
ization of science paralleled more stringent boundaries around the scien-
tifi c, including distinctions between scientists and laypeople and between
legitimate scientifi c knowledge and scientifi c error and misunderstanding.
Less permeable divisions were also emerging within science among the
various disciplines, shaped by the need to master the expanding volume
of specialized knowledge in any one area of work. Such an environment
provided considerable encouragement for invocations of pseudoscience.