Wednesday, December 8, 2010

from "Science and Religion" (1859)

"I have said that our faith in the results of the right working of the human mind rests on no mere testimony. But there is One that bears witness to it, and He the Highest. For, the winning of every new law by reasoning from ascertained facts; the verification by the event, of every scientific prediction is, if this world be governed by providential order, the direct testimony of that Providence to the sufficiency of the faculties with which man is endowed, to unravel, so far as is necessary for his welfare, the mysteries by which he is surrounded. Donati's comet lately blazing in the heavens above us at its appointed time; the first quiver which betrayed to the anxious watcher of the telegraphic needle on the other side of the Atlantic, that an electric current would follow, even under such strange conditions, the laws which man's wit and industry had discovered; the bone which, laid bare by Cuvier's chisel, justified his trust in the law of organic correlation which he had discovered; all these, and hundreds of other like cases which I might cite, are to my mind so many signs and wonders, whereby the Divine Governor signifies his approbation of the trust of poor and weak humanity, in the guide which he has given it."

T.H. Huxley

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