The Lights of the Church and the Light of Science | Page 3

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The Lights of the Church and the Light of Science by Thomas Henry
Huxley This is Essay #6 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition"

There are three ways of regarding any account of past occurrences,
whether delivered to us orally or recorded in writing.
The narrative may be exactly true. That is to say, the words, taken in
their natural sense, and interpreted according to the rules of grammar,
may convey to the mind of the hearer, or of the reader an idea precisely
correspondent with one which would have remained in the mind of a
witness. For example, the statement that King Charles the First was
beheaded at Whitehall on the 30th day of January 1649, is as exactly
true as any proposition in mathematics or physics; no one doubts that
any person of sound faculties, properly placed, who was present at
Whitehall throughout that day, and who used his eyes, would have seen
the King's head cut off; and that there would have remained in his mind
an idea of that occurrence which he would have put into words of the
same value as those which we use to express it.
Or the narrative may be partly true and partly false. Thus, some
histories of the time tell us what the King said, and what Bishop Juxon
said; or report royalist conspiracies to effect a rescue; or detail the
motives which induced the chiefs of the Commonwealth to resolve that
the King should die. One account declares that the King knelt at a high

block, another that he lay down with his neck on a mere plank. And
there are contemporary pictorial representations of both these modes of
procedure. Such narratives, while veracious as to the main event, may
and do exhibit various degrees of unconscious and conscious
misrepresentation, suppression, and invention, till they become hardly
distinguishable from pure fictions. Thus, they present a transition to
narratives of a third class, in which the fictitious element predominates.
Here, again, there are all imaginable gradations, from such works as
Defoe's quasi- historical account of the Plague year, which probably
gives a truer conception of that dreadful time than any authentic history,
through the historical novel, drama, and epic, to the purely phantasmal
creations of imaginative genius, such as the old "Arabian Nights" or the
modern "Shaving of Shagpat." It