Thomas H Huxley - Collected Quotes

"Living things have no inertia, and tend to no equilibrium." (Thomas H Huxley, "On the Educational Value of the Natural History Sciences", 1854)

"Unity of plan everywhere lies hidden under the mask of diversity of structure - the complex is everywhere evolved out of the simple." (Thomas H Huxley, "A Lobster; or, the Study of Zoology", 1861)

"Science has fulfilled her function when she has ascertained and enunciated truth."  (Thomas H Huxley, "Man's Place in Nature.", 1863)

"The method of scientific investigation is nothing but the expression of the necessary mode of working of the human mind. (Thomas H Huxley, "Our Knowledge of the Causes of the Phenomena of Organic Nature", 1863)

"Mathematical training is almost purely deductive. The mathematician starts with a few simple propositions, the proof of which is so obvious that they are called self-evident, and the rest of his work consists of subtle deductions from them." (Thomas H Huxley, "Scientific Education: Notes of an After Dinner Speech", Macmillan’s Magazine Vol. XX, 1869)

"The mathematician starts with a few propositions, the proof of which is so obvious that they are called self-evident, and the rest of his work consists of subtle deductions from them. The teaching of languages, at any rate as ordinarily practised, is of the same general nature: authority and tradition furnish the data, and the mental operations are deductive." (Thomas H Huxley, 1869)

"[...] there can be little doubt that the further science advances, the more extensively and consistently will all the phenomena of Nature be represented by materialistic formulae and symbols." (Thomas H Huxley, "On the Physical Basis of Life", 1869)

"[Mathematics] is that [subject] which knows nothing of observation, nothing of experiment, nothing of induction, nothing of causation." (Thomas H Huxley, "Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews", 1870)

"The great tragedy of Science - the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact." (Thomas H Huxley, "Biogenesis and abiogenesis", [address] 1870)

"The Mathematician deals with two properties of objects only, number and extension, and all the inductions he wants have been formed and finished ages ago. He is now occupied with nothing but deductions and verification." (Thomas H Huxley, "Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews", 1870)

"Therefore, the great business of the scientific teacher is, to imprint the fundamental, irrefragable facts of his science, not only by words upon the mind, but by sensible impressions upon the eye, and ear, and touch of the student, in so complete a manner, that every term used, or law enunciated, should afterwards call up vivid images of the particular structural, or other, facts which furnished the demonstration of the law, or the illustration of the term." (Thomas H Huxley, "Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews", 1870) 

"You may read any quantity of books, and you may be almost as ignorant as you were at starting, if you don’t have, at the back of your minds, the change for words in definite images which can only be acquired through the operation of your observing faculties on the phenomena of nature." (Thomas H Huxley, "Science and Education", 1877)

"It sounds paradoxical to say the attainment of scientific truth has been effected, to a great extent, by the help of scientific errors." (Thomas H Huxley, "The Progress of Science", 1887)

"All artificial education ought to be an anticipation of natural education."  (Thomas H Huxley, "Science and Education", 1891)

"All truth, in the long run, is only common sense clarified." (Thomas H Huxley, "Science and Education", 1891)

"Education is the instruction of the intellect in the laws of Nature, under which name I include not merely things and their forces, but men and their ways; and the fashioning of the affections and of the will into an earnest and loving desire to move in harmony with those laws." (Thomas H Huxley, "Science and Education", 1891)

"It is not a question whether one order of study or another should predominate. It is a question of what topics of education you shall elect which will combine all the needful elements in such due proportion as to give the greatest amount of food, support, and encouragement to those faculties which enable us to appreciate truth, and to profit by those sources of innocent happiness which are open to us, and, at the same time, to avoid that which is bad, and coarse, and ugly, and keep clear of the multitude of pitfalls and dangers which beset those who break through the natural or moral laws." (Thomas H Huxley, "Science and Education", 1891)

"Many of the faults and mistakes of the ancient philosophers are traceable to the fact that they knew no language but their own, and were often led into confusing the symbol with the thought which it embodied." (Thomas H Huxley, "Science and Education", 1891)

"There is but one right, and the possibilities of wrong are infinite." (Thomas H Huxley, "Science and Education", 1891)

"Accuracy is the foundation of everything else." (Thomas H Huxley, "Method and Results", 1893)

"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.'" (Thomas H Huxley, "Method and Results", 1893)

"The 'Law of Nature' is not a command to do, or to refrain from doing, anything. It contains, in reality, nothing but a statement of that which a given being tends to do under the circumstances of its existence; and which, in the case of a living and sensitive being, it is necessitated to do, if it is to escape certain kinds of disability, pain, and ultimate dissolution." (Thomas H Huxley, "Method and Results", 1893)

"The man of science has learned to believe in justification, not by faith, but by verification." (Thomas H Huxley, "Method and Results", 1893)

"The man of science, who, forgetting the limits of philosophical inquiry, slides from these formulæ and symbols into what is commonly understood by materialism, seems to me to place himself on a level with the mathematician, who should mistake the x's and y's with which he works his problems for real entities - and with this further disadvantage, as compared with the mathematician, that the blunders of the latter are of no practical consequence, while the errors of systematic materialism may paralyse the energies and destroy the beauty of a life." (Thomas H Huxley, "Method and Results", 1893)

"The scientific imagination always restrains itself within the limits of probability." (Thomas H Huxley, "Science and Christian Tradition", 1893)

"Thought is existence. More than that, so far as we are concerned, existence is thought, all our conceptions of existence being some kind or other of thought." (Thomas H Huxley, "Method and Results", 1893)

"Harmonious order governing eternally continuous progress - the web and woof of matter and force interweaving by slow degrees, 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." (Thomas H Huxley, "Darwiniana", 1893–94)

"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." (Thomas H Huxley, "Method and Results", 1893)

"The scientific spirit is of more value than its products, and irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors." (Thomas H Huxley, "Darwiniana", 1893–94)

"Whatever happens, science may bide her time in patience and in confidence." (Thomas H Huxley, "Science and Christian Tradition", 1893)

"Mathematics may be compared to a mill of exquisite workmanship, which grinds your stuff of any degree of fineness; but, nevertheless, what you get out depends upon what you put in; and as the grandest mill in the world will not extract wheat-flour from peascods, so pages of formulæ will not get a definite result out of loose data." (Thomas H Huxley, "Discourses, Biological and Geological", 1894)

"In the world of letters, learning and knowledge are one, and books are the source of both; whereas in science, as in life, learning and knowledge are distinct, and the study of things, and not of books, is the source of the latter." (Thomas H Huxley, "Discourses, Biological and Geological", 1894)

"Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not; it is the first lesson that ought to be learned; and however early a man's training begins, it is probably the last lesson that he learns thoroughly." (Thomas H Huxley)