United States or South Sudan ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
He simply 'announced. This oracular attitude certainly affected some of the younger men greatly, but fortunately for the success of the new gospel one of these younger men translated the oracular into a more popular and reasoned form. It may be said to have done for Emerson's message the kind of service rendered by Huxley to Darwin's.
It is the individual and not society that has need of government, of hospitals, of asylums, of prisons. Anarchy does not involve, as Huxley suggests, "the highest conceivable grade of perfection of social existence." Not at all.
He had a strong and deep sense of human weakness, and incapacity to attain the highest truth. He spoke of the philosophy of Descartes without respect. With most of the Port Royalists, indeed, he seems to have concurred in the Cartesian doctrine of automata, strangely revived in our day by Professor Huxley.
Not all scientists are as honest as Huxley who announces this purpose in the introduction of his "Science and Hebrew Tradition:" "These essays are for the most part intended to contribute to the process of destroying the infallibility of Scripture."
The attitude of the Primrose Sphinx who bowed his head in the Church of England Chapel the Jew who rose to the highest office Christian England had to offer and repeated Ben Ezra's prayer, was not the attitude of Newton. Darwin waived religion, and if he ever heard of the Bible no one knew it from his writings. Huxley danced on it.
Huxley obtains that perfect clearness in his own work by simple definition, by keeping steadily before his audience his intention, and by making plain throughout his lecture a well-defined organic structure. No X-ray machine is needful to make the skeleton visible; it stands forth with the parts all nicely related and compactly joined.
Professor Huxley, as usual, was among the foremost in this good work, and whether influenced by Hobbes, or Descartes, or Mr. Professor Huxley did not say outright that men and women were just as living and just as dead as their own watches, but this was what his article came to in substance.
But this is far from being true. Karl Pearson defines science as organized knowledge, and Huxley calls it organized common sense. These definitions mean the same thing.
Fortunately, however, the results have been rescued from that partial oblivion by such interpreters as Professors Huxley and Cope, so the unscientific public has been allowed to gain at least an inkling of the wonderful progress of paleontology in our generation. The writings of Huxley in particular epitomize the record.
If the past and present were purely good, who could wish that the future might possibly not resemble them? Who could desire free-will? Who would not say, with Huxley, "let me be wound up every day like a watch, to go right fatally, and I ask no better freedom." 'Freedom' in a world already perfect could only mean freedom to BE WORSE, and who could be so insane as to wish that?
Word Of The Day