"With this viewpoint in mind, he was continually trying to find connecting links by considering likenesses between man, for instance, and the various stocks inferior to him (1); and it must be admitted that in his attempt a great many unlikenesses and dissimilarities and fundamental differences, all of extreme importance, were either ignored entirely, or β may I say it? β willfully slurred over. It was the old, old story, both in Huxley's case and in Haeckel's: what was good for their theories was accepted and pressed home to the limit; and what was contrary to their theories was either ignored or suppressed. We submit that, great as these men were each in his own field, such a procedure is not a truly scientific one. We can excuse their enthusiasm; but an excuse is not by any means an extension of sympathy to the mistake."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Academics from EnglandTranslators from EnglandAgnosticsZoologists from EnglandAnthropologists from England
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
G. de Purucker,Man in Evolution, (1941)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Thomas_Henry_Huxley
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Thomas Henry Huxley
1825 β 1895
englischer Biologe
148 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Thomas Henry Huxley β
Related Quotes
"From the point of view of the moralist the animal world is on about the same level as a gladiator's show. The creaturβ¦"
"The method of scientific investigation is nothing but the expression of the necessary mode of working of the human mind."
"Life is too short to occupy oneself with the slaying of the slain more than once."
"To a person uninstructed in natural history, his country or sea-side stroll is a walk through a gallery filled with wβ¦"
"It is true that if philosophers have suffered their cause has been amply avenged. Extinguished theologians lie about β¦"
"A man has no reason to be ashamed of having an ape for his grandfather. If there was an ancestor whom I should feel sβ¦"
"I cannot but think that he who finds a certain proportion of pain and evil inseparably woven up in the life of the veβ¦"
"The fact is he made a prodigious blunder in commencing the attack, and now his only chance is to be silent and let peβ¦"
"I have never had the least sympathy with the a priori reasons against orthodoxy, and I have by nature and dispositionβ¦"
"I do not mean to suggest that scientific differences should be settled by universal suffrage, but I do conceive that β¦"