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Science & Education by Thomas Henry Huxley
page 220 of 357 (61%)
biology by its utility; and I shall try to point out to you that you
will feel the need of some knowledge of biology at a great many turns
of this present nineteenth century life of ours. For example, most of
us attach great importance to the conception which we entertain of the
position of man in this universe and his relation to the rest of
nature. We have almost all been told, and most of us hold by the
tradition, that man occupies an isolated and peculiar position in
nature; that though he is in the world he is not of the world; that his
relations to things about him are of a remote character; that his
origin is recent, his duration likely to be short, and that he is the
great central figure round which other things in this world revolve.
But this is not what the biologist tells us.

At the present moment you will be kind enough to separate me from them,
because it is in no way essential to my present argument that I should
advocate their views. Don't suppose that I am saying this for the
purpose of escaping the responsibility of their beliefs; indeed, at
other times and in other places, I do not think that point has been
left doubtful; but I want clearly to point out to you that for my
present argument they may all be wrong; and, nevertheless, my argument
will hold good. The biologists tell us that all this is an entire
mistake. They turn to the physical organisation of man. They examine
his whole structure, his bony frame and all that clothes it. They
resolve him into the finest particles into which the microscope will
enable them to break him up. They consider the performance of his
various functions and activities, and they look at the manner in which
he occurs on the surface of the world. Then they turn to other animals,
and taking the first handy domestic animal--say a dog--they profess to
be able to demonstrate that the analysis of the dog leads them, in
gross, to precisely the same results as the analysis of the man; that
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