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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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There is no alleviation for the sufferings of mankind except veracity of thought and of action, and the resolute facing of the world as it is when the garment of make-believe by which pious hands have hidden its uglier features is stripped off.
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The birth of science was the death of superstition.
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The only medicine for suffering, crime, and all other woes of mankind, is wisdom. Teach a man to read and write, and you have put into his hands the great keys of the wisdom box. But it is quite another thing to open the box.
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If the perpetual oscillation of nations between anarchy and despotism is to be replaced by the steady march of self-restraining freedom, it will be because men will gradually bring themselves to deal with political, as they now deal with scientific questions.
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Books are the money of Literature, but only the counters of Science.
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A drop of water is as powerful as a thunder-bolt.
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Of the few innocent pleasures left to men past middle life, the jamming of common sense down the throats of fools is perhaps the keenest.
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There are savages without God in any proper sense of the word, but none without ghosts.
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Surely there is a time to submit to guidance and a time to take one's own way at all hazards.
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There is assuredly no more effectual method of clearing up one's own mind on any subject than by talking it over, so to speak, with men of real power and grasp, who have considered it from a totally different point of view.
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Follow humbly wherever and to whatever abyss Nature leads, or you shall learn nothing.
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. . . I fail to find a trace [in Protestantism] of any desire to set reason free. The most that can be discovered is a proposal to change masters. From being a slave of the papacy, the intellect was to become the serf of the Bible.
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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.
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History warns us that it is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as superstitions.
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Whatever evil voices may rage, Science, secure among the powers that are eternal, will do her work and be blessed.
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Not far from the invention of fire we must rank the invention of doubt.
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It is far better for a man to go wrong in freedom than to go right in chains.
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The known is finite, the unknown infinite intellectually we stand on an islet in the midst of an illimitable ocean of inexplicability. Our business in every generation is to reclaim a little more land, to add something to the extent and the solidity of our possessions.
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A well-worn adage advises those who set out upon a great enterprise to count the cost, yet some of the greatest enterprises have succeeded because the people who undertook them did not count the cost.
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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.
Thomas Huxley