File:Man's place in nature, and other anthropological essays (1904) (14743487656).jpg

Identifier: mansplaceinnatur01huxl (find matches)
Title: Man's place in nature, and other anthropological essays
Year: 1904 (1900s)
Authors: Huxley, Thomas Henry, 1825-1895
Subjects: Human beings Apes Ethnology Indo-Europeans
Publisher: New York, J. A. Hill and company
Contributing Library: The Library of Congress
Digitizing Sponsor: The Library of Congress

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nothing interferes, and that the chief business of man-kind is to learn that order and govern themselves accordingly.Moreover this scientific criticism of life presents itself to uswith different credentials from any other. It appeals not toauthority, nor to what anybody may have thought or said, butto nature. It admits that all our interpretations of natural factare more or less imperfect and symbolic, and bids the learnerseek for truth not among words but among things. It warns usthat the assertion which outstrips evidence is not only a blunderbut a crime. The purely classical education advocated by the representativesof the Humanists in our day, gives no inkling of all this. Aman may be a better scholar than Erasmus, and know no moreof the chief causes of the present intellectual fermentation thanErasmus did. Scholarly and pious persons, worthy of all respect,favour us with allocutions upon the sadness of the antagonismof science to their mediaeval way of thinking, which betray an
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SCIENCE AND CULTURE 81 ignorance of the first principles of scientific investigation, anincapacity for understanding what a man of science means byveracity, and an unconsciousness of the weight of establishedscientific truths, which is almost comical. There is no great force in the tu quoque argument, or else theadvocates of scientific education might fairly enough retort uponthe modern Humanists that they may be learned specialists, butthat they possess no such sound foundation for a criticism of lifeas deserves the name of culture. And, indeed, if we were dis-posed to be cruel, we might urge that the Humanists have broughtthis reproach upon themselves, not because they are too full ofthe spirit of the ancient Greek, but because they lack it. The period of the Renascence is commonly called that of the Revival of Letters, as if the influences then brought to bearupon the mind of Western Europe had been wholly exhaustedin the field of literature. I think it is very commonly forgottenth

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