Aging & Wisdom Quote by William Henry Hudson

Fear arrives before thought. Hudson’s line compresses a whole theory of nature into one clean observation: across species and ages, the first response to the unfamiliar is recoil. The phrasing matters. “Animals of all classes” widens the lens beyond pets and livestock into a democratic wilderness, while “old and young” shuts down the comforting idea that experience reliably civilizes the nervous system. Whatever we learn later, the body flinches first.

Hudson, a novelist-naturalist writing in the long shadow of Darwin, is doing more than describing skittish creatures. He’s arguing for instinct as a kind of ancestral wisdom: not moral, not rational, but brutally efficient. “Shrink” is a telling verb; it’s not fight or flight yet, it’s a contraction, a protective economizing of the self. And “strange object” is deliberately vague. It could be a predator, a tool, a human hand, an invention. The ambiguity makes the claim portable: the fear response isn’t keyed to one threat but to the category of newness itself.

The subtext is uncomfortable for a culture that flatters itself with progress. If all animals fear what approaches from outside the known world, then “civilization” is partly a negotiated truce with that reflex. Hudson’s intent reads as both scientific and quietly moral: observe honestly, then notice the continuum between human and animal behavior. The sentence invites a sideways look at our own politics of suspicion - how quickly we label the unfamiliar as danger, and how much of that reaction is inherited, not chosen.