“In comparing civilized man with the animal world, one is as the Alpine traveller, who sees the mountains soaring into the sky and can hardly discern where the deep shadowed crags and roseate peaks end, and where the clouds of heaven begin. Surely the awe-struck voyager may be excused if, at first, he refuses to believe the geologist, who tells him that these glorious masses are, after all, the hardened mud of primeval seas, or the cooled slag of subterranean furnaces—of one substance with the dullest clay, but raised by inward forces to that place of proud and seemingly inaccessible glory. But the geologist is right; and due reflection on his teachings, instead of diminishing our reverence and our wonder, adds all the force of intellectual sublimity, to the mere aesthetic intuition of the uninstructed beholder.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

Source: 1860s, Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature (1863), Ch.2, p. 131-132

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "In comparing civilized man with the animal world, one is as the Alpine traveller, who sees the mountains soaring into t…" by Thomas Henry Huxley?

Thomas Henry Huxley 127

English biologist and comparative anatomist 1825–1895

Related quotes

“Meet me where the sky touches the sea. Wait for me where the world begins.”

Jennifer Donnelly (1963) American writer

“Who in the rainbow can draw the line where the violet tint ends and the orange tint begins? Distinctly we see the difference of the colors, but where exactly does the one first blendingly enter into the other? So with sanity and insanity.”

Herman Melville book Billy Budd, Sailor

Source: Billy Budd, the Sailor (1891), Ch. 21
Source: Billy Budd, Sailor
Context: Who in the rainbow can draw the line where the violet tint ends and the orange tint begins? Distinctly we see the difference of the colors, but where exactly does the one first blendingly enter into the other? So with sanity and insanity. In pronounced cases there is no question about them. But in some supposed cases, in various degrees supposedly less pronounced, to draw the exact line of demarcation few will undertake tho' for a fee some professional experts will. There is nothing nameable but that some men will undertake to do it for pay.

“He looks at the city where no one had known him.
He looks at the sky where no one looks down.
He looks at his life and what it has shown him.
He looks for his shadow it cannot be found.”

Harry Chapin (1942–1981) American musician

Sniper
Song lyrics, Sniper and Other Love Songs (1972)

“No one can any longer believe that an object ends where another begins.”

Umberto Boccioni (1882–1916) Italian painter and sculptor

Quote from Boccioni's text 'Dynamism of a Speeding Horse & Houses', 1914/15
Boccioni is here referring to the starting photography of 'moving horses' c. 1914
1914 - 1916