“I cannot but think that he who finds a certain proportion of pain and evil inseparably woven up in the life of the very worms, will bear his own share with more courage and submission”

"On the Educational Value of the Natural History Sciences" (1854) http://aleph0.clarku.edu/huxley/CE3/EdVal.html
1850s
Context: I cannot but think that he who finds a certain proportion of pain and evil inseparably woven up in the life of the very worms, will bear his own share with more courage and submission; and will, at any rate, view with suspicion those weakly amiable theories of the Divine government, which would have us believe pain to be an oversight and a mistake, — to be corrected by and by. On the other hand, the predominance of happiness among living things — their lavish beauty — the secret and wonderful harmony which pervades them all, from the highest to the lowest, are equally striking refutations of that modern Manichean doctrine, which exhibits the world as a slave-mill, worked with many tears, for mere utilitarian ends.
There is yet another way in which natural history may, I am convinced, take a profound hold upon practical life, — and that is, by its influence over our finer feelings, as the greatest of all sources of that pleasure which is derivable from beauty.

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Thomas Henry Huxley 127
English biologist and comparative anatomist 1825–1895

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