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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
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Physiologist
Lexington
Kentucky
T. H. Huxley
Huxley
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Reincarnation
Ways
Absurdity
Transmigration
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Reject
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Cosmos
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Hasty
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Plausible
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More quotes by Thomas Huxley

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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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The best men of the best epochs are simply those who make the fewest blunders and commit the fewest sins.
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And when you cannot prove that people are wrong, but only that they are absurd, the best course is to let them alone.
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Not only do I disbelieve in the need for compensation, but I believe that the seeking for rewards and punishments out of this lifeleads men to a ruinous ignorance of the fact that their inevitable rewards and punishments are here.
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The man who is all morality and intellect, although he may be good and even great, is, after all, only half a man.
Thomas Huxley
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I have no faith, very little hope, and as much charity as I can afford.
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My experience of the world is that things left to themselves don't get right.
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There is far too much of the feeding-bottle in education and young people ought to be supplied with good intellectual food and then left to help themselves.
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The very existence of society depends on the fact that every member of it tacitly admits he is not the exclusive possessor of himself, and that he admits the claim of the polity of which he forms a part, to act, to some extent, as his master.
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There are savages without God in any proper sense of the word, but none without ghosts.
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I cannot say that I am in the slightest degree impressed by your bigness, or your material resources, as such. Size is not grandeur, and territory does not make a nation. The great issue, about which hangs true sublimity, and the terror of overhanging fate, is what are you going to do with all these things?
Thomas Huxley
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Genius, as an explosive power, beats gunpowder hollow.
Thomas Huxley
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Science is simply common sense at its best.
Thomas Huxley
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I do not say think as I think, but think in my way. Fear no shadows, least of all in that great spectre of personal unhappiness which binds half the world to orthodoxy.
Thomas Huxley
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A man who speaks out honestly and fearlessly that which he knows, and that which he believes, will always enlist the good will and the respect, however much he may fail in winning the assent, of his fellow men.
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In matters of the intellect, do not pretend that conclusions are certain which are not demonstrated or demonstrable. That I take to be the agnostic faith, which if a man keep whole and undefiled, he shall not be ashamed to look the universe in the face, whatever the future may have in store for him.
Thomas Huxley
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The rules of the game are what we call the laws of nature.
Thomas Huxley
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That which endures is not one or another association of living forms, but the process of which the cosmos is the product, and of which these are among the transitory expressions.
Thomas Huxley
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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.
Thomas Huxley
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Science is simply common sense at its best, that is, rigidly accurate in observation, and merciless to fallacy in logic.
Thomas Huxley