Aphorisms and Reflections from the Works of T. H. Huxley Part 3

LV

Matter and force are the two names of the one artist who fas.h.i.+ons the living as well as the lifeless.

LVI

There is not throughout Nature a law of wider application than this, that a body impelled by two forces takes the direction of their resultant.

LVII

Orthodoxy is the Bourbon of the world of thought. It learns not, neither can it forget.

LVIII

Who shall number the patient and earnest seekers after truth, from the days of Galileo until now, whose lives have been embittered and their good name blasted by the mistaken zeal of Bibliolaters? Who shall count the host of weaker men whose sense of truth has been destroyed in the effort to harmonise impossibilities--whose life has been wasted in the attempt to force the generous new wine of Science into the old bottles of Judaism, compelled by the outcry of the same strong party?

LIX

When Astronomy was young "the morning stars sang together for joy," and the planets were guided in their courses by celestial hands. Now, the harmony of the stars has resolved itself into gravitation according to the inverse squares of the distances, and the orbits of the planets are deducible from the laws of the forces which allow a schoolboy's stone to break a window.

LX

The lightning was the angel of the Lord; but it has pleased Providence, in these modern times, that science should make it the humble messenger of man, and we know that every flash that s.h.i.+mmers about the horizon on a summer's evening is determined by ascertainable conditions, and that its direction and brightness might, if our knowledge of these were great enough, have been calculated.

LXI

Why should the souls [of philosophers] be deeply vexed? The majesty of Fact is on their side, and the elemental forces of Nature are working for them. Not a star comes to the meridian at its calculated time but testifies to the justice of their methods--their beliefs are "one with the falling rain and with the growing corn." By doubt they are established, and open inquiry is their bosom friend.

LXII

Harmonious order governing eternally continuous progress--the web and woof of matter and force interweaving by slow decrees, without a broken thread, that veil which lies between us and the Infinite--that universe which alone we know or can know; such is the picture which science draws of the world, and in proportion as any part of that picture is in unison with the rest, so may we feel sure that it is rightly painted.

LXIII

Mix salt and sand, and it shall puzzle the wisest of men, with his mere natural appliances, to separate all the grains of sand from all the grains of salt; but a shower of rain will effect the same object in ten minutes.

LXIV

Elijah's great question, "Will you serve G.o.d or Baal? Choose ye," is uttered audibly enough in the ears of every one of us as we come to manhood. Let every man who tries to answer it seriously ask himself whether he can be satisfied with the Baal of authority, and with all the good things his wors.h.i.+ppers are promised in this world and the next.

If he can, let him, if he be so inclined, amuse himself with such scientific implements as authority tells him are safe and will not cut his fingers; but let him not imagine he is, or can be, both a true son of the Church and a loyal soldier of science.

LXV

Ecclesiasticism in science is only unfaithfulness to truth.

LXVI

If the blind acceptance of authority appears to him in its true colours, as mere private judgment _in excelsis_ and if he have the courage to stand alone, face to face with the abyss of the eternal and unknowable, let him be content, once for all, not only to renounce the good things promised by "Infallibility," but even to bear the bad things which it prophesies; content to follow reason and fact in singleness and honesty of purpose, wherever they may lead, in the sure faith that a h.e.l.l of honest men will, to him, be more endurable than a paradise full of angelic shams.

LXVII

History warns us that it is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as superst.i.tions.

LXVIII

The struggle for existence holds as much in the intellectual as in the physical world. A theory is a species of thinking, and its right to exist is coextensive with its power of resisting extinction by its rivals.

LXIX

The scientific spirit is of more value than its products, and irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors.

LXX

Every belief is the product of two factors: the first is the state of the mind to which the evidence in favour of that belief is presented; and the second is the logical cogency of the evidence itself.

LXXI

Science commits suicide when it adopts a creed.

LXXII

The method of scientific investigation is nothing but the expression of the necessary mode of working of the human mind. It is simply the mode in which all phenomena are reasoned about, rendered precise and exact.

LXXIII

There are men (and I think Priestley was one of them) to whom the satisfaction of throwing down a triumphant fallacy is as great as that which attends the discovery of a new truth; who feel better satisfied with the government of the world, when they have been helping Providence by knocking an imposture on the head; and who care even more for freedom of thought than for mere advance of knowledge. These men are the Carnots who organise victory for truth, and they are, at least, as important as the generals who visibly fight her battles in the field.

LXXIV

Material advancement has its share in moral and intellectual progress.