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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

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
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The most considerable difference I note among men is not in their readiness to fall into error but in their readiness to acknowledge these inevitable lapses.
Thomas Henry Huxley
The great end of life is not knowledge but action.
Thomas Henry Huxley
Act decidedly and take the consequences. No good is ever done by hesitation.
Thomas Henry Huxley
The most considerable difference I note among men is not in their readiness to fall into error but in their readiness to acknowledge these inevitable lapses.
Thomas Henry Huxley
Of moral purpose I see no trace in Nature. That is an article of exclusively human manufacture and very much to our credit.
Thomas Henry Huxley
In order to get over the ethical difficulties presented by the naive naturalism of many parts of those Scriptures, in the divine authority of which he firmly believed, Philo borrowed from the Stoics (who had been in like straits in respect of Greek mythology), that great Excalibur which they had forged with infinite pains and skill—the method of allegorical interpretation. This mighty 'two-handed engine at the door' of the theologian is warranted to make a speedy end of any and every moral or intellectual difficulty, by showing that, taken allegorically or, as it is otherwise said, 'poetically' or, 'in a spiritual sense,' the plainest words mean whatever a pious interpreter desires they should mean.
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
Let us understand, once for all, that the ethical progress of society depends, not on imitating the cosmic process, still less in running away from it, but in combating it.
Thomas Henry Huxley
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