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The doctrine of transmigration… was a means of constructing a plausible vindication of the ways of the cosmos to man … none but very hasty thinkers will reject it on the grounds of inherent absurdity.

Thomas Huxley

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Thomas Huxley
Age: 70 †
Born: 1825
Born: May 4
Died: 1895
Died: June 29
Anatomist
Anthropologist
Biologist
Carcinologist
Ichthyologist
Linguist
Naturalist
Paleontologist
Philosopher
Photographer
Physiologist
Lexington
Kentucky
T. H. Huxley
Huxley
Way
Thinker
Hasty
Men
Rejects
Plausible
Inherent
Thinkers
Doctrine
Grounds
None
Reincarnation
Ways
Absurdity
Transmigration
Means
Reject
Vindication
Mean
Cosmos
Constructing

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Trust a witness in all matters in which neither his self-interest, his passions, his prejudices, nor the love of the marvellous is strongly concerned. When they are involved, require corroborative evidence in exact proportion to the contravention of probability by the thing testified.
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There is no greater mistake than the hasty conclusion that opinions are worthless because they are badly argued.
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The best men of the best epochs are simply those who make the fewest blunders and commit the fewest sins.
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We are prone to see what lies behind our eyes, rather than what apprears before them.
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The birth of science was the death of superstition.
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No man is any the worse off because another acquires wealth by trade, or by the exercise of a profession on the contrary, he cannot have acquired his wealth except by benefiting others to the extent of what they considered to be its value.
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Living things have no inertia, and tend to no equilibrium.
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Material advancement has its share in moral and intellectual progress. Becky Sharp's acute remark that it is not difficult to be virtuous on ten thousand a year has its applications to nations and it is futile to expect a hungry and squalid population to be anything but violent and gross.
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The struggle for existence holds as much in the intellectual as in the physical world. A theory is a species of thinking, and its right to exist is coextensive with its power of resisting extinction by its rivals.
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Science is simply common sense at its best.
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The known is finite, the unknown infinite spiritually we find ourselves on a tiny island in the middle of a boundless ocean of the inexplicable. It is our task, from generation to generation, to drain a small amount of additional land.
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To say that an idea is necessary is simply to affirm that we cannot conceive the contrary and the fact that we cannot conceive the contrary of any belief may be a presumption, but is certainly no proof, of its truth.
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Let us have sweet girl graduates by all means. They will be none the less sweet for a little wisdom and the golden hair will not curl less gracefully outside the head by reason of there being brains within.
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If a man cannot see a church, it is preposterous to take his opinion about its altar-piece or painted window.
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The only good that I can see in the demonstration of the truth of Spiritualism is to furnish an additional argument against suicide. Better live a crossing-sweeper than die and be made to talk twaddle by a medium hired at a guinea a séance.
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What men of science want is only a fair day's wages for more than a fair day's work.
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Nothing can be more incorrect than the assumption one sometimes meets with, that physics has one method, chemistry another, and biology a third.
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My reflection, when I first made myself master of the central idea of the 'Origin', was, 'How extremely stupid not to have thought of that!'
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It is the first duty of a hypothesis to be intelligible.
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Science is organized common sense where many a beautiful theory was killed by an ugly fact.
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