Science Quote by Richard Owen

Victorian science loved its grand interdependencies, but Owen is doing something subtler: walking the reader back from a fashionable, almost moralized idea of nature as a seamless web of mutual reliance. The sentence is engineered as a quiet correction. “Manifold subsequent experience” is not just humility; it’s credentialing. He’s saying: I’ve seen more specimens, more systems, more messy exceptions than the armchair theorists, and that accumulation has forced a recalibration.

The key move is the pairing of “truer appreciation” with “more moderate estimate.” Owen grants that dependence exists, even matters, while simultaneously demoting it from master principle to one factor among many. That’s a classic scientific stance, but also a cultural one. Mid-19th-century Britain was awash in arguments that borrowed from biology to justify politics: competition, providential harmony, social duty. A claim about “dependence” could easily be pressed into service as proof that hierarchy is natural, or that cooperation is destiny. Owen’s moderation resists that rhetorical hijacking. He’s not denying connection; he’s denying overreach.

Stylistically, the sentence performs restraint. Abstract nouns (“appreciation,” “estimate,” “importance,” “dependence”) create a bureaucratic calm that disguises the punch: earlier accounts were exaggerated. Coming from Owen - a major anatomist navigating the Darwinian earthquake, protective of his own authority - the line also reads as self-positioning. He claims empiricism as a moral posture: the mature scientist as one who learns, narrows, and refuses to let a seductive idea become a worldview.