ABSTRACT
In his introduction to the first issue of Nature, which follows a quotation from Wordsworth and a set of aphorisms he attributes to Goethe, Thomas Huxley claims that the journal ‘aims to mirror the progress of that fashioning by Nature of a picture of herself, in the mind of man, which we call the progress of science’ (1869: 11). Science speaks for Nature and is part of it. Though writing two
years before The Descent of Man, Huxley does not make it explicit, he is positioning science as a method and discourse through which a highly evolved animal reflects back on itself and its environment. As Huxley recognises, aspects of the way he locates the ‘mind of man’ within Nature correspond with the way the poets he quotes link mind and world, thinking things and objects of thought. As Huxley’s translation of what he takes to be Goethe puts it, ‘Mankind dwells in her [Nature] and she in them […] she creates tongues and hearts by which she feels and speaks’ (1869: 10).1
