Frasi di Thomas Henry Huxley (133 frasi, pagina 4)

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“Ai fini di una vera cultura, un'educazione esclusivamente scientifica ha quanto meno lo stesso valore di un'educazione esclusivamente letteraria.”

Thomas Henry Huxley

Origine: Da Science and Education, p. 141; citato in William Boyd, Storia dell'educazione occidentale (The History of western education), a cura di Trieste Valdi, Armando Editore, Roma, 1966.

“[L'origine delle specie di Charles Darwin è] lo strumento più potente che gli uomini hanno sottomano, dopo la pubblicazione dei Principia di Newton, per ampliare il campo della conoscenza naturale.”

Thomas Henry Huxley

Origine: Citato in James Dewey Watson, In principio fu il Verbo o il Dna? http://www.corriere.it/Primo_Piano/Documento/2005/09_Settembre/28/index.shtml, Corriere della Sera, 2 gennaio 2006.

“[Rispondendo al vescovo Samuel Wilberforce, che gli aveva ironicamente chiesto: "È da parte di suo nonno o di sua nonna, Sir, che lei è imparentato con le scimmie?"] Se dovessi scegliere per mio antenato fra una scimmia e un uomo che, per quanto istruito, usi la sua ragione per ingannare un pubblico incolto, […] non esiterei un istante a preferire una scimmia.”

Thomas Henry Huxley

Origine: Citato in Augusto Camera e Renato Fabietti, Corso di storia.

“E così, qualsiasi sistema di organi si sia studiato, quando si comparino le loro modificazioni nella serie delle scimmie, si arriva ad una sola conclusione: che le differenze strutturali che separano l'uomo dal gorilla e dallo scimpanzé non sono così grandi come quelle che separano il gorilla dalle scimmie inferiori.”

Thomas Henry Huxley

Origine: Thus, whatever system of organs be studied, the comparison of their modifications in the ape series leads to one and the same result—that the structural differences which separate Man from the Gorilla and the Chimpanzee are not so great as those which separate the Gorilla from the lower apes. (da Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature, cap. 2, § 123 https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Evidence_as_to_Man%27s_Place_in_Nature/Chapter_2#123)

“Confesso che, in considerazione della lotta per l'esistenza che ha luogo nel mondo animale, e della spaventosa quantità di dolore a cui essa deve accompagnarsi, mi piacerebbe se le probabilità fossero a favore dell'ipotesi di Descartes [sull'automatismo degli animali]; ma d'altra parte, considerando le terribili conseguenze per gli animali domestici che potrebbero conseguire a qualsiasi errore da parte nostra, è bene sbagliare dalla parte giusta, se proprio dobbiamo sbagliare, e occuparci di loro come di fratelli minori, costretti, come noi, a pagare il loro tributo per vivere e a soffrire ciò che è necessario per il bene generale. Come dice molto bene Hartley: "Noi sembriamo essere per loro come Dio."”

Thomas Henry Huxley

Origine: Da On the Hypothesis that Animals are Automata, and Its History; citato in Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson e Susan McCarthy, Quando gli elefanti piangono, traduzione di Libero Sosio, Marco Tropea Editore, Milano, 2010, p. 288. ISBN 978-88-558-0143-0

“La matematica può essere paragonata a un mulino straordinariamente ben costruito, capace di macinare a qualsiasi grado di finezza; nondimeno, quello che otteniamo dipende da quello che ci mettiamo, e come il migliore dei mulini non può ricavare farina dai baccelli di pisello, così le pagine di formule non possono ricavare risultati definitivi da dati imprecisi.”

Thomas Henry Huxley

Origine: Citato in Mario Livio, Cantonate, Rizzoli, Milano, 2013, p. 123. ISBN 978-88-17-06748-5

Thomas Henry Huxley: Frasi in inglese

“A great chapter of the history of the world is written in the chalk. Few passages in the history of man can be supported by such an overwhelming mass of direct and indirect evidence as that which testifies to the truth of the fragment of the history of the globe, which I hope to enable you to read, with your own eyes, tonight.
Let me add, that few chapters of human history have a more profound significance for ourselves. I weigh my words well when I assert, that the man who should know the true history of the bit of chalk which every carpenter carries about in his breeches-pocket, though ignorant of all other history, is likely, if he will think his knowledge out to its ultimate results, to have a truer, and therefore a better, conception of this wonderful universe, and of man’s relation to it, than the most learned student who is deep-read in the records of humanity and ignorant of those of Nature.”

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Thomas Henry Huxley

1860s, On a Piece of Chalk (1868)

“Every living creature commences its existence under a form different from, and simpler than, that which it eventually attains.”

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Thomas Henry Huxley

Origine: 1860s, Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature (1863), Ch.2, p. 74

“Missionaries, whether of philosophy or of religion, rarely make rapid way, unless their preachings fall in with the prepossessions of the multitude of shallow thinkers, or can be made to serve as a stalking-horse for the promotion of the practical aims of the still larger multitude, who do not profess to think much, but are quite certain they want a great deal.”

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Thomas Henry Huxley

1890s

“The primary purpose of a liberal education is to make one's mind a pleasant place in which to spend one's time.”

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Thomas Henry Huxley

Sydney J. Harris, as quoted in The Routledge Dictionary of Quotations (1989) by Robert Andrews; also quoted as: "...a pleasant place in which to spend one's leisure."
Misattributed

“Life cannot exist without a certain conformity to the surrounding universe — that conformity involves a certain amount of happiness in excess of pain. In short, as we live we are paid for living.”

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Thomas Henry Huxley

1860s, Reply to Charles Kingsley (1860)

“Sound knowledge respecting the habits and mode of life of the man-like Apes has been even more difficult of attainment than correct information regarding their structure.”

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Thomas Henry Huxley

Origine: 1860s, Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature (1863), Ch.1, p. 36

“Mr. Darwin's hypothesis is not, so far as I am aware, inconsistent with any known biological fact; on the contrary, if admitted, the facts of Development, of Comparative Anatomy, of Geographical Distribution, and of Palaeontology, become connected together, and exhibit a meaning such as they never possessed before; and I, for one, am fully convinced that if not precisely true, that hypothesis is as near an approximation to the truth as, for example, the Copernican hypothesis was to the true theory of the planetary motions.”

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Thomas Henry Huxley

Origine: 1860s, Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature (1863), Ch.2, p. 127

“That mysterious independent variable of political calculation, Public Opinion.”

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Thomas Henry Huxley

"Universities, Actual and Ideal" (1874) http://aleph0.clarku.edu/huxley/CE3/U-Ac-I.html
1870s

“Is Man so different from any of these Apes that he must form an order by himself? Or does he differ less from them than they differ from one another, and hence must take his place in the same order with them?”

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Thomas Henry Huxley

Origine: 1860s, Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature (1863), Ch.2, p. 86

“Most of us, shrinking from the difficulties and dangers which beset the seeker after original answers to these riddles, are contented to ignore them altogether, or to smother the investigating spirit under the featherbed of respected and respectable tradition. But, in every age, one or two restless spirits, blessed with that constructive genius, which can only build on a secure foundation, or cursed with the mere spirit of scepticism, are unable to follow in the well-worn and comfortable track of their forefathers and contemporaries, and unmindful of thorns and stumbling-blocks, strike out into paths of their own.”

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Thomas Henry Huxley

Origine: 1860s, Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature (1863), Ch.2, p. 71

“Whatever part of the animal fabric—whatever series of muscles, whatever viscera might be selected for comparison—the result would be the same—the lower Apes and the Gorilla would differ more than the Gorilla and the Man.”

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Thomas Henry Huxley

Origine: 1860s, Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature (1863), Ch.2, p. 101

“To a person uninstructed in natural history, his country or sea-side stroll is a walk through a gallery filled with wonderful works of art, nine-tenths of which have their faces turned to the wall.”

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Thomas Henry Huxley

"On the Educational Value of the Natural History Sciences" (1854) p. 29 http://books.google.com/books?id=FJZWAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA29
1850s

“It cannot be doubted, I think, that Mr. Darwin has satisfactorily proved that what he terms selection, or selective modification, must occur, and does occur, in nature; and he has also proved to superfluity that such selection is competent to produce forms as distinct, structurally, as some genera even are. If the animated world presented us with none but structural differences, I should have no hesitation in saying that Mr. Darwin has demonstrated the existence of a true physical cause, amply competent to account for the origin of living species, and of man among the rest.”

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Thomas Henry Huxley

Origine: 1860s, Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature (1863), Ch.2, p. 126

“The sceptics end in the infidelity which asserts the problem to be insoluble, or in the atheism which denies the existence of any orderly progress and governance of things: the men of genius propound solutions which grow into systems of Theology or of Philosophy, or veiled in musical language which suggests more than it asserts, take the shape of the Poetry of an epoch.”

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Thomas Henry Huxley

Origine: 1860s, Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature (1863), Ch.2, p. 72

“The method of scientific investigation is nothing but the expression of the necessary mode of working of the human mind.”

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Thomas Henry Huxley

"Our Knowledge of the Causes of the Phenomena of Organic Nature" (1863) http://aleph0.clarku.edu/huxley/CE2/Phen.html
1860s

“The absolute justice of the system of things is as clear to me as any scientific fact. The gravitation of sin to sorrow is as certain as that of the earth to the sun, and more so–for experimental proof of the fact is within reach of us all–nay, is before us all in our own lives, if we had but the eyes to see it.”

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Thomas Henry Huxley

1860s, Reply to Charles Kingsley (1860)

“Logical consequences are the scarecrows of fools and the beacons of wise men.”

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Thomas Henry Huxley

1870s, On the Hypothesis that Animals are Automata, and Its History (1874)

“So far from the posterior lobe, the posterior cornu, and the hippocampus minor, being structures peculiar to and characteristic of man, as they have been over and over again asserted to be, even after the publication of the clearest demonstration of the reverse, it is precisely these structures which are the most marked cerebral characters common to man with the apes. They are among the most distinctly Simian peculiarities which the human organism exhibits.”

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Thomas Henry Huxley

Origine: 1860s, Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature (1863), Ch.2, p. 119

“There is but one hypothesis regarding the origin of species of animals in general which has any scientific existence—that propounded by Mr. Darwin.”

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Thomas Henry Huxley

Origine: 1860s, Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature (1863), Ch.2, p. 125

“M. Comte's philosophy, in practice, might be compendiously described as Catholicism minus Christianity.”

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Thomas Henry Huxley

"On the Physical Basis of Life" (1868) http://aleph0.clarku.edu/huxley/CE1/PhysB.html
1860s

“Even in the important matter of cranial capacity, Men differ more widely from one another than they do from the Apes; while the lowest Apes differ as much, in proportion, from the highest, as the latter does from Man.”

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Thomas Henry Huxley

Origine: 1860s, Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature (1863), Ch.2, p. 95

“What is this wide-spread component of the surface of the earth? and whence did it come?
You may think this no very hopeful inquiry. You may not unnaturally suppose that the attempt to solve such problems as these can lead to no result, save that of entangling the inquirer in vague speculations, incapable of refutation and of verification.
If such were really the case, I should have selected some other subject than a "piece of chalk" for my discourse. But, in truth, after much deliberation, I have been unable to think of any topic which would so well enable me to lead you to see how solid is the foundation upon which some of the most startling conclusions of physical science rest.”

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Thomas Henry Huxley

1860s, On a Piece of Chalk (1868)

“The greater part of the substance of the following Essays has already been published in the form of Oral Discourses, addressed to widely different audiences, during the past three years. Upon the subject of the second Essay, I delivered six Lectures to the Working Men in 1860, and two, to the members of the Philosophical Institution of Edinburgh in 1862.”

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Thomas Henry Huxley

Advertisement to the Reader, p. 7
1860s, Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature (1863)

“My reflection when I first made myself master of the central idea of the Origin was, "How extremely stupid of me not to have thought of that."”

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Thomas Henry Huxley

Another version of this quotation, omitting the "of me" phrase, appears in Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley F.R.S (1900) edited by Leonard Huxley, p. 170
1880s, On the Reception of the Origin of Species (1887)