[This article continues my earlier post, “Materialism vs. Supernaturalism? ‘Scientific Naturalism’ in Context”].

Is the popular conflation of scientific naturalism with ontological materialism historically legit? Our first look at the context of Thomas H. Huxley’s first usage of ‘scientific naturalism’ in the sense in which it is deployed today suggested that it is not: Yes, Huxley fought tooth and nail to wrestle science from the censorship of dogmatic religious patrons and administrators through science professionalization and popularization. Still, his anti-clericalism alone doesn’t exactly make Huxley an early incarnation of Dawkins, Pinker, or any other present-day popular prophet of what’s often called ‘scientific materialism’. Like most contemporary educational reformers, Huxley was in fact vehemently opposed to materialism as a philosophical position or worldview.

We also briefly noted that when Huxley first used ‘scientific naturalism’ in a modern sense, he did what science popularizers along with many professional philosophers and historians usually do today: he quasi-defined ‘naturalism’ merely by juxtaposing it with ‘supernaturalism’, while crucially bypassing a precise definition of the latter term.

Perhaps the most fundamental pillar of scientific naturalism in the vein of Huxley and colleagues was the assumption of the uniformity of nature. So we may expect that Huxley’s notion of supernaturalism boiled down to certain influential concepts of miracles as violations or suspensions of natural law by supposed divine interference. In a nutshell, miracles would thus forever remain empirically inscrutable since they somehow stood outside nature rather than being part of it.

But as we will see shortly, this was not was Huxley had in mind. And we will also begin to realise why we need to pay rather close attention to the role of spiritualism, which was gaining momentum as a new grassroots religion, and whose alleged marvels increasingly attracted serious attention from many of Huxley’s scientific peers.

Before we revisit Huxley, let’s look at two of the most influential notions of miracles in history.

Supernatural Miracles or Preternatural Marvels?

In contrast to modern academic usages of ‘supernatural’ as an extremely vague label for a vast range of phenomena and beliefs associated with magic, there was a time when the term and some of its translations (such as the German übernatürlich) had a fairly specific meaning within the universities.

In the medieval and early modern university, it was related to the distinction of marvels and miracles going back to the scholastic philosophy of Thomas Aquinas. Following Aquinas, a miracle described an empirical fact that constituted an actual violation or suspension of natural laws, and was worked directly or indirectly by an act of God as the author of these laws. (Think the whole range of biblical miracles, from divine healing to the resurrection of the dead, etc.). A marvel, on the other hand, was a phenomenon that may have resembled a miracle, but was actually worked according to laws of nature not yet understood.

The medical astrology taught in the universities was just one example of a tradition which nobody would have termed ‘supernatural’ at the time (including astrologers such as Kepler and Galileo). Even more strikingly, supposed evidence of witchcraft, such as levitations and materializations reported to occur during outbreaks of poltergeist disturbances and instances of demonic possession, was rarely viewed in terms of miracles. Rather, these reported marvels were believed to be worked by demons or ‘unclean spirits’ – not owing to their ability to breach natural laws (which again was commonly held something only God could do), but to their privileged insights into the very fabric and structure of nature.

Hence, contrary to terminological standards today, it would have made no sense for early modern natural philosophers to speak of demons and other spirits as ‘supernatural beings’ either.

The distinction between preternatural marvels and supernatural miracles was also fundamental to the Renaissance tradition of ‘natural magic’, represented by figures such as G. Pico della Mirandola, Jan Baptist van Helmont, and Paracelsus. Francis Bacon, the supposed ‘father’ of modern inductive science, has often been quoted in his attacks on natural magic. But this obscures the fact that he was a firm believer in natural-magical principles. When read in context, Bacon’s critiques reveal that he seemed mainly worried about excessive magical beliefs.

Long before the coinage of ‘telepathy’ and ‘telekinesis’ in the nineteenth century, Bacon and other figureheads of the Scientific Revolution referred to manifestations of mental influence or correspondences over a distance as effects of ‘imagination’ (‘fascination’ was another often used term), and took them for granted as natural rather than supernatural phenomena. Many non-religious folk claim telepathic experiences today, and secular scientists occasionally publish successful parapsychological experiments, but Bacon also embraced things modern believers in telepathy would probably dismiss as intolerably weird.

One such belief that was perhaps as widespread as it was bizarre concerned murder victims, whose corpses were often claimed to start bleeding or open their eyes in the presence of their murderers (on which I already quoted Bacon here). Explicitly distinguishing miracles from natural-magical effects of ‘imagination’, Bacon writes:

“It may be that this participateth of a miracle, by God’s just judgment, who usually brings murthers to light. But if it be Natural, it must be referred to Imagination” (Bacon, 1670, 207).

That ‘imagination’ is here used not in its modern meaning as ‘fantasy’ or ‘illusion’ but in a natural-magical sense is further exemplified when Bacon continues to cite yet another outlandish example of contemporary magic: the “tying of the point upon the day of Marriage, to make Men impotent towards their Wives”. Bacon held this was reported so frequently that

“if it be Natural, must be referred to the Imagination of him that tieth the Point. I conceive it to have the less affinity with Witchcraft, because not peculiar persons onely, (such as Witches are) but any Body may do it” (ibid., 207-8).

From Hume to Huxley

Professional historical scholarship has long assigned natural magic a much more central place within early modern science than popular accounts of the Scientific Revolutions would still have it. Yet, when Enlightenment philosopher David Hume wrote the first edition of his now famous attack on miracles in the late 1740s, the distinction between natural-magical or preternatural and supernatural phenomena was already blurred.

A future post will take a closer look at Hume’s essay “Of Miracles”. For now let’s just state that throughout the text, Hume used the terms “extraordinary”, “marvellous”, “miraculous” and “supernatural” interchangeably. He also targeted the biblical miracles along with contemporary reports of phenomena allegedly worked by the ‘French Prophets’ at the tomb of the Jansenist François de Pâris during Hume’s lifetime: levitations, faith healing, “oracles” (i.e. the precursors of spiritualist mediums), and premonitions. Based on a critique of human testimony, Hume dismissed any of these alleged phenomena as supposed violations of natural law. And interestingly for us as historians, the only time Hume refers to “natural magic” (in a later edition of the essay) it was by selectively quoting Francis Bacon – not as a proponent of natural magic, but rather misleadingly as an opponent (Hume, 1779, 138).

Hume’s essay on miracles figures as a key text in anti-superstition crusades by secular as well as certain religious figures today, and there are ongoing philosophical debates over the validity of its reasoning. But what’s typically missing in today’s readings of Hume are appreciations of the historical context in which his anti-miracle essay emerged.

Hume’s rhetorical sleight of hand (his equation of ‘supernatural’ with ‘marvellous’ and ‘extraordinary’, his misrepresentation of Bacon as an enemy of natural magic, etc.) suggests that the blurring of definitions of the natural and supernatural during the Enlightenment occurred actively and programmatically. In fact, by the mid-eighteenth century, attempts to distinguish the supposed innate natural-magical efficacy of the incarnate mind’s intentions from the interference of devils on the one hand and divine miracles on the other, were more bound than ever to come under heavy fire from influential spokesmen of otherwise mutually opposed ideological and metaphysical camps. And as historians of Enlightenment science and medicine have come to realise, advances in science and medicine had little to do with the ‘decline of magic’.

To cut a long and complex story much too short: On the one side, the church continued to jealously guard its authority in matters of magic and severely persecute heretical practitioners. On the other side, Protestant, deist and other anti-Catholic religious writers were in rare unison with atheists and materialist thinkers, when they attacked, ridiculed and pathologized reports of empirically verifiable magical effects (including ‘fascination’, ‘imagination’, and reports of spirit apparitions) as being on the same footing as superstitious beliefs and fears of ‘savages’ and peasants, on which the political power of the Church was alleged to rest.

Apart from a need to appreciate Hume’s essay as being part of the ‘Enlightenment crusade’ in general, much more remains to be said about the specific context of his attack on miracles – not least about Hume’s worries over the quality and quantity of witnesses attesting to the phenomena of the ‘French Prophets’.

Moreover, Hume’s essay only began achieving its modern prominence in the nineteenth century, when it was rediscovered to battle theological notions of miracles on the hand, and widespread empirical claims of supposedly ‘supernatural’ phenomena in animal magnetism and spiritualism on the other.

Huxley was a great admirer of Hume, and his deep aversion to spiritualism and other claims of marvellous phenomena is well known. So when he first used ‘scientific naturalism’ in juxtaposition with ‘supernaturalism’ in a book in which he also derided spiritualism as its latest form, it could well be expected that he may quote Hume as an ally.

However, those familiar with Huxley’s Hume: With Helps to the Study of Berkeley (1894) already know that he rejected Hume’s pre-interpretation of claimed anomalous or extraordinary phenomena as self-evident violations of natural law.

We remember: ‘agnosticism’ was Huxley’s original coinage and only transformed by him into ‘scientific naturalism’ in 1892 over disagreements with Herbert Spencer’s version of agnosticism. Yet, the tenets of ‘agnosticism’ and ‘scientific naturalism’ remained the same, including of course the axiomatic assumption of the uniformity of nature. Hence, Huxley again implicitly rejected scholastic and related theological dichotomies of miracles and marvels along with Hume’s definition of both as breaches of natural law:

“For myself, I am bound to say that the term ‘Nature’ covers the totality of that which is. The world of psychical phenomena appears to me to be as much part of ‘Nature’ as the world of physical phenomena; and I am unable to perceive any justification for cutting the Universe into two halves, one natural and one supernatural” (Huxley, 1892, 35n1).

This seems like a great place for Huxley to finally define what on earth he meant by “supernatural”.

But this quote occurred in a mere footnote, which starts with a somewhat bewildering statement: “I employ the words ‘Supernature’ and ‘Supernatural’ in their popular senses” (loc. cit.). And this note followed from another statement on the same page, where Huxley stressed that the principle of scientific naturalism

“leads not to the denial of the existence of any Supernature; but simply to the denial of the validity of the evidence adduced in favour of this, or of that, extant form of Supernaturalism” (ibid., 35).

Enter: Alfred Russel Wallace, the ‘other Darwin’

Huxley’s Essays upon some Controverted Questions sport his usual sarcastic remarks on the supposed inherent stupidity of spiritualism, which played no minor role in related polemical writings by Tyndall, Spencer, and other now less famous fellow science ‘naturalizers’ not only in Britain. One who vehemently disagreed with Huxley both on terminology and the crucial question of evidence was Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-originator of modern evolutionary theory.

It is often forgotten that Huxley was an old friend of ‘the other Darwin’ Wallace, who, far from being an orthodox bible-thumper, was just as fed up with dogmatic Christians prohibiting research on theological grounds as Huxley. But much to the horror of Darwin and Huxley, Wallace was also a devout spiritualist.

After having come to believe in the reality of ‘mesmeric clairvoyance’ in the late 1840s, about two decades later Wallace started visiting various spiritualist mediums and soon became convinced that they indeed channelled spirits of the dead. What’s more, the centrality of spiritualism for Wallace the naturalist became evident when he openly proposed that evolutionary theory had to reckon with discarnate spirits, whom he firmly believed were interfering in the course of biological evolution.

Crucially, like most other advocates of spiritualist investigations, Wallace explicitly rejected ‘supernatural’ as a label for its reported phenomena. Reaffirming the unity of nature as the fundamental principle of scientific naturalism, he wrote, for example:

“Spiritualism is an experimental science, and affords the only sure foundation for a true philosophy and a pure religion. It abolishes the terms ‘supernatural’ and ‘miracle’ by an extension of the sphere of law and the realm of nature; and in doing so it takes up and explains whatever is true in the superstitions and so-called miracles of all ages” (Wallace, 1875, 221).

Wallace’s zealous tone already suggests that he was perhaps not the most reliable witness of spiritualist phenomena, and we will take a closer look at the nature of contemporary critiques of his defences on another occasion.

Wallace was no doubt a man on a mission, but Huxley hasn’t been called ‘Darwin’s bulldog’ without a reason either. As we will see, Huxley’s own sporadic visits of mediums shouldn’t be taken as self-evident proof of unbiased, scientific curiosity. And you’ve already guessed that we will come back to competing uses of evolutionary theory in the discourse over magic more than once.

The next part of our little series on the history of scientific naturalism will start digging a little deeper into some of the concrete concerns over science and magic, which plagued Huxley and many of his contemporaries. Apart from taking a closer look at Huxley’s appropriations of the past to make history serve his own agenda, we will also start preparing the ground for an aspect that has received remarkably little attention from historians of scientific naturalism: debates over spiritualism and the ‘supernatural’ within fledgling experimental psychology.

© Andreas Sommer

References

(see also the bibliography of the previous post)

(Disclaimer: If you buy books using our affiliate weblinks, this will help run Forbidden Histories as your purchase will yield a small commission, at no extra cost for you.)



Bacon, Francis. 1670. Sylva Sylvarum, or A Natural History, in Ten Centuries (ninth ed.). London: William Lee [Search on Abebooks].

Clark, Stuart. 1999. Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press [US readers] [UK readers] [Search on Abebooks].

Daston, Lorraine. 2000. “Preternatural philosophy.” In Biographies of Scientific Objects, edited by L. Daston, 15-41. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press [US readers] [UK readers] [Search on Abebooks].

Fichman, Martin. 2006. An Elusive Victorian: The Evolution of Alfred Russel Wallace. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press [US readers] [UK readers] [Search on Abebooks].

Hume, David. 1779. “Of Miracles.” In Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects (vol. 2, 117-140). Dublin: J. Williams (original ed. 1748) [Search on Abebooks].

Huxley, Thomas H. 1892. Essays upon some Controverted Questions. London: Macmillan and Co [Search on Abebooks].

Huxley, Thomas H. 1894. “The order of nature: Miracles.” In Hume: With Helps to the Study of Berkeley, 152-164. London: Macmillan and Co. [Search on Abebooks].

Kottler, Malcolm Jay. 1974. “Alfred Russel Wallace, the origin of man, and spiritualism.” Isis 65:144-192.

Porter, Roy. 1999. “Witchcraft and magic in Enlightenment, Romantic and liberal thought.” In Witchcraft and Magic in Europe. Volume 5. The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, edited by Bengt Ankarloo and Stuart Clark, 191-282. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press [US readers] [UK readers] [Search on Abebooks].

Sera-Shriar, Efram. 2018 (electr. pre-publication, print version forthcoming). “Credible witnessing: A. R. Wallace, spiritualism, and a ‘new branch of anthropology’.” Modern Intellectual History. doi: 10.1017/S1479244318000331.

Sommer, Andreas. 2013. “Crossing the Boundaries of Mind and Body. Psychical Research and the Origins of Modern Psychology.” Ph.D. thesis, University College London.

Sommer, Andreas. 2018. “Geisterglaube, Aufklärung und Wissenschaft – historiographische Skizzen zu einem westlichen Fundamentaltabu.” In Jenseits des Vertrauten. Facetten transzendenter Erfahrungen, edited by Heiner Schwenke, 183-216. Freiburg i. Br.: Verlag Karl Alber [open access PDF].

Walker, Daniel Pickering. 2000. Spiritual & Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press (first published in 1958) [US readers] [UK readers] [Search on Abebooks].

Wallace, Alfred Russel. 1875. On Miracles and Modern Spiritualism. Three Essays. London: James Burns [Search on Abebooks].

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