“The world of things entered your infant mind
To populate that crystal cabinet.”

— Julian Huxley

Poem in Essays of a Biologist (1923), quoted by Richard Dawkins in A Devil's Chaplain (2003).
Context: The world of things entered your infant mind
To populate that crystal cabinet.
Within its walls the strangest partners met,
And things turned thoughts did propagate their kind.
For, once within, corporeal fact could find
A spirit. Fact and you in mutual debt
Built there your little microcosm—which yet
Had hugest tasks to its small self assigned.
Dead men can live there, and converse with stars:
Equator speaks with Pole, and Night with Day:
Spirit dissolves the world's material bars—
A million isolations burn away.
The Universe can live and work and plan,
At last made God within the mind of man.

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

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Julian Huxley 38

English biologist, philosopher, author 1887–1975

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