The Great 19th-Century Biologist and Anatomist Thomas Huxley on Darwin’s Legacy and What Makes Us Human

In praise of the faculty “making every generation somewhat wiser than its predecessor, — more in accordance with the established order of the universe.”

“The quality of a civilisation,” Iris Murdoch insisted in her sublimely insightful “Salvation by Words,” “depends upon the scope and purity of its language.” Two decades later, in becoming the first black woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, Toni Morrison bellowed elemental truth from the Stockholm podium in her remarkable accepta...