5. Science and Nature: Texts
- Thomas Henry Huxley’s letter to Charles Kingsley
In this 1860 letter, a close friend and colleague of Charles Darwin responds to his friend, an Anglican minister, who has recently consoled him after his son’s death with assurances of the soul’s immortality. Cordially but pointedly and passionately, Huxley defines his position as an agnostic and defends the importance of seeking truth through scientific inquiry.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Nature”(1836)
In this first chapter of Nature, which is a key work of the American Transcendentalist movement, Emerson describes himself as a “transparent eyeball” that absorbs and becomes part of the natural world. Emerson’s mystical vision of nature stands in contrast to the detached scientific views of Bacon and Darwin, but his sense of overall connection merges nicely with Carson’s “Obligation to Endure.”
- Galaxy Cluster Abell 1689
This well-known photograph from the Hubble Telescope shows a cluster of hundreds of galaxies that are all billions of light years away.
It gives a dramatic demonstration of the universe’s immensity and shows some of the most recent and stunning achievements of scientific observation. Contrast this photograph with the cosmological chart of the Ptolemaic universe on page 382 of the text.
