We may take it to be the ...

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.
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 Asa Gray

Quotes from the same author

I accept extinction as best explaining disjoined species. I see that the same cause must have reduced many species of great range to small, and that it may have reduced large genera to so small, and of families.
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 Asa Gray
Natural selection is not the wind which propels the vessel, but the rudder which, by friction, now on this side and now on that, shapes the course.
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 Asa Gray
Agassiz, when I saw him last, had read but a part of Origin of Species. He says it is POOR-VERY POOR!!. The fact is, he is very much annoyed by it.
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 Asa Gray