Consciously or not, the bishop was effectively asking whether Huxley was prepared to affirm that he and all other people were prisoners of biology. Blinded by contempt, Huxley seems not to have realized that his adversary was posing, however rudely, an important question. (The “great question,” the great conservationist George Perkins Marsh called it a few years later: “whether man is of nature or above her.”)
