We By No Means Rule Over

This passage appears in Dialectics of Nature, a collection of manuscripts and notes Engels worked on between 1873 and 1886 but never finished — he was occupied after Karl Marx's death in 1883 with editing the unpublished volumes of Capital. In the essay "The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man," Engels argues against the Cartesian separation of humanity from nature, insisting that human beings are as much natural phenomena as any other species. The observation anticipates ecological thinking: human mastery over nature is always partial, and the attempt to dominate it without understanding our place within it produces unintended consequences.