Thomas Huxley Quotes on Knowledge
Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895), "Darwin's bulldog" and the leading Victorian popularizer of the new evolutionary biology, gave nineteenth-century philosophy of religion the term agnostic, which he coined in 1869 to name the epistemological position that the existence of God and the soul are matters on which the available evidence warrants no positive belief either way. The agnostic framework, defended at length in essays such as Agnosticism (1889) and the long monograph on Hume (1879), treats the honest distribution of belief in proportion to evidence as the cardinal cognitive virtue and the principal moral obligation of the modern intellectual life.
Quotes
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“Try to learn something about everything and everything about something.”
A favourite comment, inscribed on his memorial at Ealing, quoted in Nature Vol. XLVI (30 October 1902), p. 658 -
Attributed to Thomas Huxley:
“Agnosticism is not a creed, but a method.”
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“The great tragedy of science is the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.”
Presidential Address at the British Association, "Biogenesis and abiogenesis" (1870) ; later published in Collected Essays , Vol. 8, p. 229 -
“Sit down before fact as a little child, prepared to give up every preconceived notion.”
Letter to Charles Kingsley -
Attributed to Thomas Huxley:
“The deepest sin against the human mind is to believe things without evidence.”
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“Darwiniana: the Origin of Species (1860)”
It is true that if philosophers have suffered their cause has been amply avenged. Extinguished theologians lie about the cradle of every science as the strangled snakes beside that of Hercules ; and history records that whenever science and orthodoxy have been fairly opposed, the latter has been forced to retire from the lists, bleeding and crushed if not annihilated; scotched , if not slain. But -
“About Richard Owen 's view on human and ape brains, in a letter to J.D. Hooker (27 April 1861)”
The fact is he made a prodigious blunder in commencing the attack, and now his only chance is to be silent and let people forget the exposure. I do not believe that in the whole history of science there is a case of any man of reputation getting himself into such a contemptible position.