William Hardy McNeill Quotes

With the historicization of the heavens the age-old idea of discovering universal laws of behavior applicable everywhere and always seems to have lost plausibility, whether for sub-atomic particles or for human beings. ...all such patterns and regularities, it seems to me, should be understood to be limited, local, evanescent — including, now, even the laws of physics.

Categories of understanding along with everything else alter as societies change.

In 1933-34, I took a full-blown college course on the University of Chicago campus. This was part of an experiment by President Hutchins to see whether combining the last two years of high school with the first two years of college might make a more rigorous curriculum possible for what he called "General Education." This he hoped might provide a rational, philosophical guide to adult life and citizenship, replacing the vanished religious certainties he had grown up to reject—and regret.

An irresistible cycle seemed to operate, repeating patterns of the ancient world where civil strife and war brought disaster... I surmised that patterned and predictable changes were in turn rooted in the very nature of civilization—the ineluctable breaker of custom and eroder of moral codes, and itself a product and expression of rapid technological and social change.

Ever since language allowed human cultural evolution to impinge upon age-old processes of biological evolution, humankind has been in a position to upset older balances of nature in quite the same fashion as disease upsets the natural balance within a host's body. Time and again, a temporary approach to stabilization of new relationships occurred as natural limits to the ravages of humankind upon other life forms manifested themselves. Yet, sooner or later, and always within a span of time that remained miniscule in comparison with the standards of biological evolution, humanity discovered new techniques allowing fresh exploitation of hitherto inaccessible forms of life.

The Chinese language lacked terms capable of conveying Buddhist meanings; and not until the fifth century did a handful of scholars become sufficiently at home in both Chinese and Indian learning to be able to translate Buddhist texts into Chinese with a modicum of adequacy. ...the novel and initially alien outlook of the Indian faith had somehow to come to terms with the various strands already woven into Chinese culture, ranging... from Confucian and Taoist learning to local sub-literate peasant magic. ...while accommodating themselves to older Chinese expectations, Buddhist doctrines and practices simultaneously widened and redefined traditional Chinese sensibilities and aspirations.

The diffusion of alchemy westward, like the movement of astrology eastward, became significant only in the centuries after 200 A.D. The conservatism of learning was such that, even when commercial intercourse had made intellectual contacts possible, little serious interchange took place until severe social stress had disturbed the even tenor of the times in China, India, and Europe. Technology was a little, but only a little, less conservative.

New diseases like syphilis seemed to call for new and "stronger" medicines; and this became one of the stock arguments for resort to the Paracelsian chemical pharmacopeia and mystical medical philosophy. With every fundamental of medicine thus called into question, the only logical recourse was to observe results of cures administered in accordance with the old Galenic as against the new Paracelsian theories, and then to choose whichever worked better. The swift development of European medical practice to levels of skill exceeding all other civilized traditions resulted.

Birth control may in time catch up with death control. ...But for the present and the short-range future, it remains obvious that humanity is in course of one of the most massive and extraordinary ecological upheavals the planet has ever known. ...a sequence of sharp alterations and abrupt oscillations in existing balances between microparasitism and macroparasitism can therefore be expected in the near future as in the recent past.

I departed from parental paths significantly and abruptly one Sunday morning when, sitting in the family pew of the Hyde Park United Church and idly twisting a loose button on the cushion beside me, I said to myself, "I do not believe in God." Some months previously... when our minister fell back on St. Anselm's ontological argument to prove the existence of God, he entirely failed to convince me. Quite the contrary, the argument struck me as an abuse of language. Though I duly submitted to the ritual of confirmation... Horton's unconvincing argument had sown doubt in my mind; and for that reason I can assign, on that morning, listening to his more emotional, hortatory rhetoric... the balance tipped, committing me to a secret, personal rejection of the Christian piety my parents held dear.

Before the eighteenth century the demographic impact of the profession of medicine remained negligible. Relatively few persons could afford to pay a doctor for his often very expensive services; and for every case in which the doctor's attendance really made a difference between life and death, there were other instances in which even the best available professional services made little difference to the course of the disease, or actually hindered recovery. ...Only with the eighteenth century did the situation begin to change; and it was not until after 1850 or so that the practice of medicine and the organization of medical services begin to make large-scale differences in human survival rates and population growth.

There was a Christian redaction of the historical vision of reality, associated especially with the thought of St. Augustine of Hippo.

Communication always involves slippage, and intellectual discourse is particularly liable to being twisted since a recipient can only accommodate novelty by fitting it into a preexisting structure of ideas.

Inferences and large dosages of imagination actually have allowed the construction of a far more adequate understanding of the cosmic and human past than earlier generations achieved. I believe that this is the central intellectual accomplishment of the twentieth century. Innumerable cosmologists, physicists, mathematicians, anthropologists, sociologists, historians, ecologists, ethologists, and other specialists have played their part; a few swashbuckling intellects led the way, and the outlines of an evolutionary worldview, uniting natural and human history, has begun to emerge. It may be convincing for generations to come—or again may not.