C. E. Ayres's reliance on T. H. Huxley: did Darwin's bulldog bite?

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, The,  Oct, 1995  by Lamar B. Jones

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I

Huxley and Huxley

The influence of Huxley upon Ayres is the heart of this essay. The intent is to show that in his writings Ayres really "stood" upon a three legged stool in terms of formulation of his analytic base. Dewey and Veblen each represent legs, and ones that are well acknowledged, but Huxley was the third leg, and his influence upon Ayres is poorly understood and ignored. Why? One question deserves another? Why was Huxley among all the books Ayres wrote, his favorite? Breit and Culbertson poignantly describe how Ayres, elderly and with failing eyesight, had his wife read Huxley to him (Breit and Culbertson, 9). Solace was not obtained through Veblen or Dewey, but through Huxley. Breit and Culbertson do not expound upon Huxley's influence beyond issuing the tantalizing statement that Huxley is directly related to the theoretical structure Ayres tried to construct for institutional economics, (8). While Breit and Culbertson were sympathetic to Ayres, as a person and as a scholar, the probing inquiry concerning Huxley comes from the pen of the ever perceptive Gordon Tullock, who was not sympathetic to Ayres's writings. Tullock argues that Huxley was what Ayres wanted to be, in the sense that Ayres had great admiration for Huxley as an individual and as a challenger of an old order (Tullock, 135).

Huxley initially appears in Ayres's first book on science, published in 1927 as Science: The False Messiah.(1) This work, while fundamentally an attack on scientists, is indicative of Ayres's emerging relationship with the writings of Huxley. One can sense, in the passages in which Ayres references Huxley, a great deal of Ayres himself. For example, Ayres writes that "Natural knowledge and religious authority were direct contraries in the mind of Huxley." Certainly this was also the view Ayres held. For Huxley, Ayres writes, ". . . scepticism was a scientific duty." Moreover, Ayres quotes Huxley's argument that "It cannot be otherwise, for every great advancement in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority, the cherishing of the keenest scepticism and the annihilation of the spirit of blind faith." Ayres was, of course, working toward his own rejection of the prevailing authority in economics, and, like Huxley he recognized his own impending isolation from the mainstream which would inevitably follow. The ". . . more sceptical a man becomes," Ayres wrote, "the more isolated he seems to be." As a generalization, he argued that "susceptibility to doubts is produced in men by some sort of social isolation. They feel cut off from their civilization. Consequently they can venture not to believe in it (emphasis added)." Ayres did recognize that Huxley "does not now appear to have been an isolated man," but comments that "we have many evidences in his own hand that he did feel cut off from his generation, particularly in his youth." Obviously Ayres could readily identify with that these perceptions in and about Huxley. When Ayres observed that "Scientists, after reaching the age of discretion may have some doubts about the legendary sanctities," since "Most men do who are intelligent enough to amount to very much in any profession," he was writing about himself as well as about Huxley (Ayres 1972, 187-189).

In Huxley, Ayres's second book about science, a brilliant young scientist - Thomas Henry Huxley - is portrayed racing forward to carry Darwin's message concerning man.(2) Huxley, for Ayres, represented the triumph of a new paradigm in science, one that was fully applicable to economics. The "new man" was here, one free from the ideas that he was a fallen angel, recognizing fully that he was a part of nature, a species among other species. Adam Smith's views about man were now, for Ayres, no longer valid. Moreover the behavioral postulates about man assumed in both classical and neoclassical economic theory were now false, for they rested on the discredited structure of pre-Darwinian science.

Tullock, in comparing Ayres's two works on science, found that "The attitude of mind and general approach to society is the same in both." In the older work, Ayres attacks an entrenched establishment, while in Huxley he ". . . celebrates the overthrow of another entrenched establishment and the great accomplishments of one of the warriors who achieved that overthrow." Tullock finds that Ayres apparently identifies himself with Huxley and ". . . would like to feel (although he realizes the evidence is against him) that his attack upon economic orthodoxy was as successful as Huxley's attack on pre-Darwinian science" (Tullock, 135).

Ayres's own words make it difficult to disagree with Tullock's observations. In Huxley, Ayres wrote that upon the occasion of Huxley's receipt of the Darwin medal, in 1894, ("his final growl as Darwin's bull dog,") Huxley expressed his own view that Darwin's views constituted ". . . an epoch in the intellectual history of the human race. They will modify the whole system of our thought and opinion, our most intimate convictions." For Ayres it was "characteristic of Huxley that he took no credit for this intellectual revolution." Ayres thought he should, for in his view it was Huxley who made the intellectual revolution, ". . . for which The Origin of Species was the symbol and the scripture" (Ayres 1932, 94-95). Strong words, these, but Ayres could be, as Dorfman observed, polemical and sometimes inflammatory (Dorfman, 129). Mirowski, more recently, comments on Ayres's penchant for issuing obiter dicta (Mirowski, 129).