The thief and the murderer follow nature just as much as the philanthropist.

Huxley’s remark pushes back against the idea that whatever is “natural” is therefore morally good. By placing criminals and benefactors on the same footing as products of nature, he underscores that nature describes how beings behave, not how they ought to behave. The line aligns with Huxley’s broader critique of deriving ethics from evolutionary struggle: the processes that shape life—competition, predation, and self-advantage—can generate both admirable and reprehensible human actions. Moral progress, on this view, requires conscious restraint and social cultivation rather than passive conformity to “nature.”