The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century
1887
The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century
1887
The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century, published in 1887 by Thomas Henry Huxley, examines the significant advancements in physical science and technology from the mid-19th century and their transformative effects on civilization. Huxley provides a comprehensive overview of how these developments have improved living standards and addressed issues like disease and scarcity. He emphasizes the historical context of scientific inquiry and the importance of hypotheses in driving progress, highlighting the interconnectedness of scientific advancements with industrial growth and societal changes.
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“But anyone who is practically acquainted with scientific work is aware that those who refuse to go beyond fact, rarely get as far as fact; and anyone who has studied the history of science knows that almost every great step therein has been made by the 'anticipation of Nature,' that is, by the invention of hypotheses, which, though verifiable, often had very little foundation to start with.””
— Thomas Henry Huxley
“From the dawn of exact knowledge to the present day, observation, experiment, and speculation have gone hand in hand; and, whenever science has halted or strayed from the right path, it has been, either because its votaries have been content with mere unverified or unverifiable speculation (and this is the commonest case, because observation and experiment are hard work, while speculation is amusing); or it has been, because the accumulation of details of observation has for a time excluded speculation.””
— Thomas Henry Huxley
“The tendency to variation in living beings, which all admitted as a matter of fact; the selective influence of conditions, which no one could deny to be a matter of fact, when his attention was drawn to the evidence; and the occurrence of great geological changes which also was matter of fact; could be used as the only necessary postulates of a theory of the evolution of plants and animals which, even if not at once, competent to explain all the known facts of biological science, could not be shown to be inconsistent with any.””
— Thomas Henry Huxley
“An interesting contrast between the geology of the present day and that of half a century ago, is presented by the complete emancipation of the modern geologist from the controlling and perverting influence of theology, all-powerful at the earlier date. As the geologist of my young days wrote, he had one eye upon fact, and the other on Genesis; at present, he wisely keeps both eyes on fact, and ignores the pentateuchal mythology altogether. The publication of the 'Principles of Geology' brought upon its illustrious a period of social ostracism; the instruction given to our children is based upon those principles. Whewell had the courage to attack 's fundamental assumption (which surely is a dictate of common sense) that we ought to exhaust known causes before seeking for the explanation of geological phenomena in causes of which we have no experience.””
— Thomas Henry Huxley
“Wherever sufficiently numerous series of the remains of any given group, which has endured for a long space of time, are carefully examined, their morphological relations are never in discordance with the requirements of the doctrine of evolution, and often afford convincing evidence of it. At the same time, it has been shown that certain forms persist with very little change, from the oldest to the newest fossiliferous formations; and thus show that progressive development is a contingent, and not a necessary result, of the nature of living matter.””
— Thomas Henry Huxley
“The question of the position of man, as an animal, has given rise to much disputation, with the result of proving that there is no anatomical or developmental character by which he is more widely distinguished from the group of animals most nearly allied to him, than they are from one another.””
— Thomas Henry Huxley
“and , in this country, resumed the work of the Italians and of ; and the former, aided by a marvellous power of clear exposition, placed upon an irrefragable basis the truth that natural causes are competent to account for all events, which can be proved to have occurred, in the course of the secular changes which have taken place during the deposition of the stratified rocks. The publication of 'The Principles of Geology,' in 1830, constituted an epoch in geological science. But it also constituted an epoch in the modern history of the doctrines of evolution, by raising in the mind of every intelligent reader this question: ?””
— Thomas Henry Huxley
“The careful observations and the acute reasonings of the Italian geologists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; the speculations of in the 'Protogaea' and of in his 'Théorie de la Terre;' the sober and profound reasonings of , in the latter part of the eighteenth century; all these tended to show that the fabric of the earth itself implied the continuance of processes of natural causation for a period of time as great, in relation to human history, as the distances of the heavenly bodies from us are, in relation to terrestrial standards of measurement. The abyss of time began to loom as large as the abyss of space. And this revelation to sight and touch, of a link here and a link there of a practically infinite chain of natural causes and effects, prepared the way, as perhaps nothing else has done, for the modern form of the ancient theory of evolution.””
— Thomas Henry Huxley
“It is certain that the labors of these early workers in the field of natural knowledge were brought to a standstill by the decay and disruption of the Roman Empire, the consequent disorganisation of society, and the diversion of men's thoughts from sublunary matters to the problems of the supernatural world suggested by Christian dogma in the Middle Ages. And, notwithstanding sporadic attempts to recall men to the investigation of nature, here and there, it was not until the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that physical science made a new start, founding itself, at first, altogether upon that which had been done by the Greeks. Indeed, it must be admitted that the men of the Renaissance, though standing on the shoulders of the old philosophers, were a long time before they saw as much as their forerunners had done.””
— Thomas Henry Huxley
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Huxley, Thomas Henry. The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century. Lex, lex-books.com/book/the-advance-of-science-in-the-last-half-century-77096d60-acd5-4ed0-8618-060a75083659.Huxley, T. H. (1887). The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-advance-of-science-in-the-last-half-century-77096d60-acd5-4ed0-8618-060a75083659Huxley, Thomas Henry. The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-advance-of-science-in-the-last-half-century-77096d60-acd5-4ed0-8618-060a75083659.
