Science and the Public 359public throughout the seventies and eighties with his many works on
extraterrestrial life, was neither an Anglican clergyman nor a woman. He
actually straddled the worlds of professional and popular science, having
been active in the Royal Astronomical Society as honorary secretary in
the early seventies. A product of St. John’s College, Cambridge, where he
studied theology and mathematics, Proctor was forced to live by his pen
when he incurred a huge debt as a result of a failed investment. Proctor
was involved in almost all aspects of popular science activity. He authored
over sixty books, mostly on astronomy; wrote at least fi ve hundred es-
says that appeared in a wide variety of periodicals such as Popular Sci-
ence Monthly, Cornhill Magazine, Contemporary Review, Fortnightly Review,
Fraser’s Magazine, and Nineteenth Century; founded the London scientifi c
periodical Knowledge in 1881, which he edited until his death; and lec-
tured extensively in England, the United States, and even Australasia.
Whereas some popularizers expressed their opposition to scientifi c
naturalism by rejecting evolutionary theory on religious grounds or by
embracing forms of thought inimical to Huxley and his friends, Proctor’s
resistance was far subtler. Establishing a close relationship with Alfred Rus-
sel Wallace, Arabella Buckley pursued with him a passionate interest in
spiritualism behind the backs of her scientifi c naturalist friends. Margaret
Gatty was violently opposed to evolution and wrote a parody of Darwin’s
theory in her “Inferior Animals” (1860), one of the stories published in
the third series of her Parables.^61 But Proctor often expressed his respect
for Darwin, Huxley, Tyndall, and other scientifi c naturalists, defending
them on several occasions from the charge of atheism.^62 He embraced
Spencer’s conception of the Unknowable, a shadowy deity behind na-
ture, and accepted Huxley’s term “agnosticism” as an accurate label for
his own position. He even agreed with the scientifi c naturalists that the
cultural authority of the Anglican clergy needed to be questioned. The
clergy, experts in rowing or tennis, were educated only in the “systems
of training adopted for ministers of various orders,” which limited and
narrowed their abilities to “deal with the higher and nobler problems of
religion.” But the man of science usually “had a special training for dis-
cussing questions whose relation to the higher philosophy of religion is
somewhat nearer than the relation of whist or cricket, or even Greek and
Latin syntax, to theological and doctrinal problems.”^63
However Proctor’s attitude toward the professionalization of science
would not have endeared him to Huxley. He undercut the scientifi c natu-
ralists’ push for more salaried positions in science in his Wages and Wants
of Science- Workers (1876), where he was openly critical of schemes to se-
cure state funding for science put forward by the Devonshire Commission