Robert Chambers Quotes

The skeptical view appears to me out of harmony with the inductive philosophy. Bacon gives us many warnings against preconceived opinions and prejudices; but he does not bid us despair of ascertaining facts from our own senses and from testimony. ...we do not find in Bacon any dogma like that of Mr. Faraday that the 'laws of nature are the foundation of our knowledge in natural things,' and that these form our only safe test for any new fact presented to our observation. Bacon's method is rather the contrary, namely, that facts are to serve as the foundation of the laws of nature.

When we hear of carbon beginning to appear in the ascending series of rocks, we are unavoidably led to consider it as marking a time of some importance in the earth's history, a new era of natural conditions, one in which organic life has probably played a part.

The probability may now be assumed that the human race sprung from one stock which was at first in a state of simplicity if not barbarism.

The working-classes require leaders and wise heads from their own body—patriarchs, in the old acceptation of the term—to keep them right in moments of excitement. The causes of early death prevent the existence of such a class of men, sobered and wise from experience, in sufficient numbers to discipline the youthful and fiery spirits who, confident in their ignorance, plunge themselves and those depending on their exertions into ruin.

All, we see, is done by certain laws of matter, so that it becomes a question of extreme interest, what are such laws? All that can yet be said, in answer, is, that we see certain natural events proceeding in an invariable order under certain conditions, and thence infer the existence of some fundamental arrangement which, for the bringing about of these events, has a force and certainty of action similar to, but more precise and unerring than those arrangements which human society makes for its own benefit, and calls laws. It is remarkable of physical laws, that we see them operating on every kind of scale as to magnitude, with the same regularity and perseverance.

I believe my doctrines to be in the main true; I believe all truth to be valuable, and its dissemination a blessing.

Abstract perfection should always be the direction aimed at by human efforts, however imperfect they may be; and the success of sanitary legislation will be indicated by the nearness or the distance of its actual practice from this perfect idea.

It has been among the visions of some dreaming philosophers that human life is capable of almost indefinite extension. The great Condorcet was one of these. He thought that by the removal of the two causes of evil—poverty and superfluity—by destroying prejudices and superstitions, and by various other operations, which he considered the purification of mankind, but which other people would call their pollution, the approach of death would by degrees be farther and farther indefinitely protracted. It is desirable that the practical views entertained by sanitary reformers should be kept widely distinct from any such theories, the character of which has been well drawn by Malthus when he says—"...Though I may not be able in the present instance to mark the limit at which further improvement will stop I can very easily mention a point at which it will not arrive."

The facts, indeed, connected with this gloomy department of statistics show that the most valuable period of human life—that in which a man is producing more than he is consuming—is that which provides the greatest number of victims.

Mr. Babbage's illustration powerfully suggests that this ordinary procedure may be subordinate to a higher law which only permits it for a time, and in proper season interrupts and changes it.

The limbs of all the vertebrate animals are, in like manner, on one plan, however various they may appear.

Just suppose for a moment that every fact reported to us by others were viewed in the light of the skeptical system, as to the fallaciousness of the senses and the tendency to self-deception. Should we not from that moment be at a stand-still in all the principal movements of our lives?

The progress of knowledge is very irregular, somewhat resembling the movements of an army, of which some battalions are in vigorous health, while others are sickly or overburdened with baggage. The experimental marches on at a good pace; the observational proceeds but slowly; the speculative is left far in the rear.

Zoophyta, polyparia, crinoidea, conchifera, and crustacea are the orders of the animal kingdom thus found in the earliest of earth's sepulchres.

Under the flowing robes of nature, where all looks arbitrary and accidental, there is an artificiality of the most rigid kind. The natural, we now perceive, sinks into and merges in a Higher Artificial. ...we conclude, when we attain a knowledge of the artificiality which is at the basis of nature, that nature is wholly the production of a Being resembling, but infinitely greater than ourselves.