Science Quote by Thomas Huxley

Order, in Huxley’s view, is not nature’s default setting but an artifact of effort. The line has the clipped finality of a lab conclusion: run the experiment long enough and the “control” condition - doing nothing - reliably yields drift, rot, and error. Huxley, Darwin’s bulldog, spent his career arguing that the world operates by impersonal processes rather than moral design. So his skepticism isn’t just about messy desks or neglected institutions; it’s a rebuke to comforting metaphysics. If evolution is driven by selection amid scarcity and struggle, then “left to themselves” doesn’t mean “quietly improving.” It means reverting to entropy, to brute competition, to outcomes no one would call just.

The subtext is political without sounding like a manifesto. Victorian Britain liked its progress narrative: history as an escalator, society as self-correcting, markets and morals converging if you stop meddling. Huxley snaps that illusion. Progress, he implies, is a human imposition on a world indifferent to our standards. That’s why the phrasing matters: “my experience” grounds the claim in observation, not ideology; “don’t get right” smuggles in a moral yardstick while denying that the universe shares it.

Contextually, it sits neatly with Huxley’s later insistence that ethics is a counter-current to nature, not an extension of it. Civilization doesn’t emerge because the cosmos is benevolent; it survives because people build institutions, cultivate habits, and keep repairing what decay would gladly reclaim.