Aphorisms and Reflections from the works of T. H. HuxleyHuxley, Thomas Henry
Philosophy
Aphorisms and Reflections from the works of T. H. Huxley
Huxley, Thomas Henry
Science
If the twentieth century is to be better than the nineteenth, it will be
because there are among us men who walk in Priestley's footsteps. But
whether Priestley's lot be theirs, and a future generation, in justice
and in gratitude, set up their statues; or whether their names and fame
are blotted out from remembrance, their work will live as long as time
endures. To all eternity, the sum of truth and right will have been
increased by their means; to all eternity, falsehood and injustice will
be the weaker because they have lived.
LXXVI
Science is, I believe, nothing but _trained and organised common sense_,
differing from the latter only as a veteran may differ from a raw
recruit: and its methods differ from those of common sense only so far
as the guardsman's cut and thrust differ from the manner in which a
savage wields his club.
LXXVII
The vast results obtained by Science are won by no mystical faculties,
by no mental processes, other than those which are practised by every
one of us, in the humblest and meanest affairs of life. A detective
policeman discovers a burglar from the marks made by his shoe, by a
mental process identical with that by which Cuvier restored the extinct
animals of Montmartre from fragments of their bones.
LXXVIII
There is no side of the human mind which physiological study leaves
uncultivated. Connected by innumerable ties with abstract science,
Physiology is yet in the most intimate relation with humanity; and by
teaching us that law and order, and a definite scheme of development,
regulate even the strangest and wildest manifestations of individual
life, she prepares the student to look for a goal even amidst the
erratic wanderings of mankind, and to believe that history offers
something more than an entertaining chaos--a journal of a toilsome,
tragi-comic march nowhither.
LXXIX
I cannot but think that he who finds a certain proportion of pain and
evil inseparably woven up in the life of the very worms, will bear his
own share with more courage and submission; and will, at any rate, view
with suspicion those weakly amiable theories of the Divine government,
which would have us believe pain to be an oversight and a mistake,--to
be corrected by and by. On the other hand, the predominance of happiness
among living things--their lavish beauty--the secret and wonderful
harmony which pervades them all, from the highest to the lowest, are
equally striking refutations of that modern Manichean doctrine, which
exhibits the world as a slave-mill, worked with many tears, for mere
utilitarian ends.
LXXX
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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