We may take it to be the accepted idea that the Mosaic books were not handed down to us for our instruction in scientific knowledge, and that it is our duty to ground our scientific beliefs upon observation and inference, unmixed with considerations of a different order.
More Quotes by Asa Gray
It remains to consider what attitude thoughtful men and Christian believers should take respecting them, and how they stand related to beliefs of another order.
It was always understood that plants and animals, though completely contrasted in their higher representatives, approached each other very closely in their lower and simpler forms. But they were believed not to blend.
Next it was found that it was physiologically and structurally the same in the plant, that it was the living part of the plant, that which manifested the life and did the work in vegetable as well as in animal organisms.
In short, the animal and vegetable lines, diverging widely above, join below in a loop.
The former conviction that these two kingdoms were wholly different in structure, in function, and in kind of life, was not seriously disturbed by the difficulties which the naturalist encountered when he undertook to define them.
I am sufficiently convinced already that the members of a profession know their own calling better than anyone else can know it.