X ON THE STUDY OF BIOLOGY 273 



whatever practical people may say, this world is, 

 after all, absolutely governed by ideas, and very 

 often by the wildest and most hypothetical ideas, 

 it is a matter of the very greatest importance that 

 our theories of things, and even of things that 

 seem a long way apart from our daily lives, should 

 be as far as possible true, and as far as possible 

 removed from error. It is not only in the coarser, 

 practical sense of the word " utility," but in this 

 higher and broader sense, that I measure the 

 value of the study of biology by its utility ; and I 

 shall try to point out to you that you will feel the 

 need of some knowledge of biology at a great 

 many turns of this present nineteenth century 

 life of ours. For example, most of us attach great 

 importance to the conception which we entertain 

 of the position of man in this universe and his 

 relation to the rest of nature. We have almost 

 all been told, and most of us hold by the tradition, 

 that man occupies an isolated and peculiar position 

 in nature ; that though he is in the world he is 

 not of the world ; that his relations to things 

 about him are of a remote character ; that his 

 origin is recent, his duration likely to be short, 

 and that he is the great central figure round 

 which other things in this world revolve. But 

 this is not what the biologist tells us. 



At the present moment you will be kind 

 enough to separate me from them, because it is in 

 no way essential to my present argument that I 



