The “Essential Antithesis”

T.H. Huxley and humankind’s place in nature

Abstract

The problem relative to man’s place in nature operated as a common thread among several notions and theories formulated and debated in Victorian England. Thomas Huxley encapsulated this topic in the title of a highly influential work from the 1860s onwards. The aim of the present study was to analyze contextual and epistemological features relative to Huxley’s book. He prioritized the criteria provided by comparative anatomy and the current ideas on human races, as well as the traditional notions on the gradation of species and “scale of nature”, aiming at formulating a general law that would ensure the essential unity of humankind with the remainder of nature.