10 Thomas Henry Huxley Quotes on Philosophy

Thomas Henry Huxley quotes on philosophy

1. I cannot but think that he who finds a certain proportion of pain and evil inseparably woven up in the life of the very worms, will bear his own share with more courage and submission; and will, at any rate, view with suspicion those weakly amiable theories of the Divine government, which would have us believe pain to be an oversight and a mistake, - to be corrected by and by. On the other hand, the predominance of happiness among living things - their lavish beauty - the secret and wonderful harmony which pervades them all, from the highest to the lowest, are equally striking refutations of that modern Manichean doctrine, which exhibits the world as a slave-mill, worked with many tears, for mere utilitarian ends. There is yet another way in which natural history may, I am convinced, take a profound hold upon practical life, - and that is, by its influence over our finer feelings, as the greatest of all sources of that pleasure which is derivable from beauty.

10. M. Comte's philosophy, in practice, might be compendiously described as Catholicism minus Christianity.

12. If some great Power would agree to make me always think what is true and do what is right, on condition of being turned into a sort of clock and wound up every morning before I got out of bed, I should instantly close with the offer. The only freedom I care about is the freedom to do right; the freedom to do wrong I am ready to part with on the cheapest terms to any one who will take it of me.

41. I neither deny nor affirm the immortality of man. I see no reason for believing in it, but, on the other hand, I have no means of disproving it.

59. The extent of the region of the uncertain, the number of the problems the investigation of which ends in a verdict of not proven, will vary according to the knowledge and the intellectual habits of the individual agnostic. I do not very much care to speak of anything as unknowable. What I am sure about is that there are many topics about which I know nothing, and which, so far as I can see, are out of reach of my faculties. But whether these things are knowable by any one else is exactly one of those matters which is beyond my knowledge, though I may have a tolerably strong opinion as to the probabilities of the case.

61. I took thought, and invented what I conceived to be the appropriate title of 'agnostic.' It came into my head as suggestively antithetic to the 'gnostic' of Church history, who professed to know so much about the very things of which I was ignorant. To my great satisfaction the term took.

64. 'The doctrine that all men are, in any sense, or have been at any time, free and equal, is an utterly baseless fiction.'

    Attribution disputed; shown as originally published.

67. The primary purpose of a liberal education is to make one's mind a pleasant place in which to spend one's time.

73. 'Pope Huxley' title of an article by R.H. Hutton who complains that whilst THH advocates agnosticism for everyone else, he's apt to be a mite too certain himself!

80. 'From [1854] until 1885 Huxley's labours extended over the widest field of biology and philosophy ever covered by any naturalist with the single exception of Aristotle'