J. Arthur Thomson

“ It is a great thing to be constrained to recognise that a system is possible which may bring all human thought into unity, that there may be a formula which may express the law of change in all spheres where change happens, and that the universe as a whole and in all its parts forms one system. Suppose that the particular formula of Mr Spencer is inadequate, is a failure, yet is it not something worthy of recognition, that a man has lived who gave his life to the elaboration of this thought, and has so far succeeded as to make men think that such a consummation is possible and desirable? ”

“ Between us and the stars stretch vast regions empty of all matter. But we see the stars; their light reaches us, even though it may take centuries to do so. We conceive, then, that it is the universal ether which conveys that light. All the energy which has reached the earth from the sun and which, stored for ages in our coal-fields, is now used to propel our trains and steamships, to heat and light our cities, to perform all the multifarious tasks of modern life, was conveyed by the ether. Without that universal carrier of energy we should have nothing but a stagnant, lifeless world. ”

“ Is there no hopefulness in trying to give a scientific account of the nature and history and genesis of the confessedly vast and perplexing orders of facts which we call Physical Nature, Animate Nature, and Human Nature?—then let us become agnostics pure and simple, or let us remain philosophers or theologians, poets or artists, and sigh over an impetuous science which started so much in debt that its bankruptcy was a foregone conclusion! ”

“ Organic evolution means that the present is the child of the past and the parent of the future. It is not a power or a principle; it is a process—a process of becoming. It means that the present-day animals and plants and all the subtle inter-relations between them have arisen in a natural knowable way from a preceding state of affairs on the whole somewhat simpler, and that again from forms and inter-relations simpler still, and so on backwards and backwards for millions of years till we lose all clues in the thick mist that hangs over life's beginnings. ”

“ He looked forward to a unification of knowledge, to "one science, which has for its object-matter the continuous transformation which the universe undergoes." "Evolution being a universal process, one and continuous throughout all forms of existence, there can be no break, no change from one group of concrete phenomena to another without a bridge of intermediate phenomena." ”

“ There will be no floating dust, no scent, no twilight, no blue sky, no twinkling of the stars. The sky will be always black and the stars will be clearly visible by day as by night. The sun's wonderful corona, which no man on earth, even by seizing every opportunity during eclipses, can hope to see for more than two hours in all in a long lifetime, will be visible all day. So will the great red flames of the sun. Of course, there will be no life, and no landscape effects and scenery effects due to vegetation. ”

“ The evolution-idea is perhaps as old as clear thinking, which we may date from the (unknown) time when man discovered the year—with its marvellous object-lesson of recurrent sequences—and realised that his race had a history. Whatever may have been its origin, the idea was familiar to several of the ancient Greek philosophers, as it was to Hume and Kant; it fired the imagination of Lucretius and linked him to another poet of evolution—Goethe; it persisted, like a latent germ, through the centuries of other than scientific preoccupation ”

“ Things do not fall down unless they are pulled down by that mysterious force which we call gravitation. The earth, it is true, is pulled by the sun, and would fall into it; but the earth escapes this fiery fate by circulating at great speed round the sun. The stars pull each other; but it has already been explained that they meet this by travelling rapidly in gigantic orbits. Yet we do, in a new sense of the word, need foundations of the universe. Our mind craves for some explanation of the matter out of which the universe is made. For this explanation we turn to modern Physics and Chemistry. ”

“ If we pass from these relatively near bodies to the thirty millions of remote suns and solar systems, where shall we find a reason for all this apparently unconscious existence, infinite in amount compared with the existence which is conscious—a waste Universe as it seems? Then behind these mysteries lies the all-embracing mystery—whence this universal transformation which has gone on unceasingly throughout a past eternity and will go on unceasingly throughout a future eternity? ”

“ All through the ages necessity has been the mother of invention and curiosity its father; but perhaps we miss the heart of the matter if we forget the importance of some leisure time—wherein to observe and think. If our earth had been so clouded that the stars were hidden from men's eyes the whole history of our race would have been different. ”

“ The illustrious author of the Germ-Plasm has made it quite clear that there is a great difference between admitting that the germ-plasm has no charmed life, insulated from bodily influences, and admitting the transmissibility of a particular acquired character, even in the faintest degree. The whole point is this: Does a change in the body, induced by use or disuse or by a change in surroundings, influence the germ-plasm in such a specific or representative way that the offspring will exhibit the same modification which the parent acquired, or even a tendency towards it? ”

“ We can glimpse the vast stores of energy locked up in matter. The new knowledge has much to tell us about the origin and phenomena, not only of our own planet, but other planets, of the stars, and the sun. New light is thrown on the source of the sun's heat; we can make more than guesses as to its probable age. The great question to-day is: is there one primordial substance from which all the varying forms of matter have been evolved?
But the discovery of electrons is only one of the revolutionary changes which give modern science an entrancing interest. ”

“ For the biologist as a scientific inquirer "the problem of whether life is or is not a mechanism is not a question of whether the same things, 'matter' and 'force,' are or are not at the back of organic and inorganic phenomena—of what is at the back of either class of sense-impressions we know absolutely nothing—but of whether the conceptual shorthand of the physicist, his ideal world of ether, atom, and molecule, will or will not also suffice to describe the biologist's perceptions." ”

“ There are some eighty-odd chemical elements on the earth to-day, and it is now much more than a suggestion that these are the outcome of an inorganic evolution, element giving rise to element, going back and back to some primeval stuff, from which they were all originally derived, infinitely long ago. No idea has been so powerful a tool in the fashioning of New Knowledge as this simple but profound idea of Evolution, that the present is the child of the past and the parent of the future. ”

“ It is quite plain that the sociological evolutionist will not advance far if he disregards the concept of the social organism, if he shuts his eyes to the fact that a societary form, however simple, is an integrate; not a mere congeries of persons, but a unity with a life and mind of its own. Yet he may quite consistently try to trace the emergence of societary forms from a simply gregarious stock, and that again from entirely non-social organisms. ”

“ There are others who think that the most scientific position is simply to recognise both the bodily and the mental activities as equally important, and so closely interwoven that they cannot be separated. Perhaps they are just the outer and the inner aspects of one reality—the life of the creature. Perhaps they are like the concave and convex curves of a dome, like the two sides of a shield. Perhaps the life of the organism is always a unity, at one time appearing more conspicuously as Mind-body, at another time as Body-mind. ”

“ He evidently looked forward with hope to a time "when the general science of society has solved the problems which it has as yet only managed to define more or less clearly—when for positive knowledge it can offer us something better than a mixture of vague and variously applied physiological analogies, imperfectly verified historical generalisations, and unwarranted political predictions—when it has succeeded in establishing on the basis of a really scientific induction its forecasts of social evolution." ”

“ So much energy is wasted in the production of heat-waves and ultra-violet waves which we do not want, that 90 per cent. or more of the power used in illumination is wasted. Would that the glow-worm, or even the dead herring, would yield us its secret! Phosphorus is the one thing we know as yet that suits the purpose, and—it smells! Indeed, our artificial light is not only extravagant in cost, but often poor in colour. The unwary person often buys a garment by artificial light, and is disgusted next morning to find in it a colour which is not wanted. ”

“ In conclusion, after his wonted manner, Spencer pointed out that Variation, like everything else, is necessitated by the Persistence of Force. "The members of a species inhabiting any area cannot be subject to like sets of forces over the whole of that area. And if, in different parts of the area, different kinds or amounts or combinations of forces act on them, they cannot but become different in themselves and in their progeny. To say otherwise, is to say that differences in the forces will not produce differences in the effects; which is to deny the persistence of force." ”

“ Picture the fate of the world when the sun has become a dull red-hot ball, or even when it has cooled so far that it would no longer emit light to us. That does not all mean that the world would be in inky darkness, and that the sun would not emit light to the people then inhabiting this world, if any had survived and could keep themselves from freezing. To such, if the eye continued to adapt itself to the changing conditions, our blues and violets would be ultra-violet and invisible, but our dark heat would be light and hot bodies would be luminous to them which would be dark to us. ”

“ What must we say of the life, minute, multitudinous, degraded, which, covering the ocean-floor, occupies by far the larger part of the Earth's area; and which yet, growing and decaying in utter darkness, presents hundreds of species of a single type? Or, when we think of the myriads of years of the Earth's past, during which have arisen and passed away low forms of creatures, small and great, which, murdering and being murdered, have gradually evolved, how shall we answer the question—To what end? ”

“ Ideas are just foam-bells on the hurrying streams and circling eddies of matter and energy that make up our physiological life. To most of us this theory is impossible, because we are quite sure that ideas and feelings and purposes, which cannot be translated into matter and motion, are the clearest realities in our experience, and that they count for good and ill all through our life. ”

“ Speaking of Huxley's wonderful versatility as a thinker, he said that it lent "some colour to the dictum—quite untenable, however—that genius is a unit, and, where it exists, can manifest itself equally in all directions." As it seems to us, there is much truth in the dictum which Spencer dismissed as "quite untenable." The genius is a new variation of high potential and is as such a unity, capable of expressing itself in many diverse ways, and always with originality. ”

“ The atmosphere all day long is sorting out the waves. The blue "sky" overhead means that the fine particles in the upper atmosphere catch the shorter waves, the blue waves, and scatter them. We can make a tubeful of blue sky in the laboratory at any time. The beautiful pink-flush on the Alps at sunrise, the red glory that lingers in the west at sunset, mean that, as the sun's rays must struggle through denser masses of air when it is low on the horizon, the long red waves are sifted out from the other shafts. ”

“ Lastly come the insoluble questions concerning our own fate: the evidence seeming so strong that the relations of mind and nervous structure are such that cessation of the one accompanies dissolution of the other, while, simultaneously, comes the thought, so strange and so difficult to realise, that with death there lapses both the consciousness of existence and the consciousness of having existed. ”

“ The atoms of matter are vibrating or gyrating with extraordinary vigour. The piece of cold iron you hold in your hand, the bit of brick you pick up, or the penny you take from your pocket is a colossal reservoir of energy, since it consists of trillions of moving atoms. To realise the total energy, of course, we should have to witness a transformation such as we do in atoms of radio-active elements, about which we shall have something to say presently.
If we put a grain of indigo in a glass of water, or a grain of musk in a perfectly still room, we soon realise that molecules travel. ”

“ To me there is no place so delightful as the beach. It is the place where, more than anywhere else, philosophy and poetry meet—where in fact you are presented by Nature with a never-ending feast of knowledge and beauty. There is no place where I can so palpably realise Emerson's remark that 'Nature is the circumstance which dwarfs every other circumstance.'"
One evening in August 1861 Spencer stood looking over the Sound of Mull from Ardtornish house. ”

“ For life is not for science, but science for life. And even more than science, to our way of thinking, is the individual development of the scientific way of looking at things. Science is our legacy; we must use it if it is to be our very own. ”

“ With the development of tool-using and sentence-making, with recognition of the seasons as a fundamental illustration of the uniformity of nature, with the gaining of a firmer foothold in the struggle for existence, with slowly increasing altruism and sociality, and with the occasional emergence of the genius, there might gradually arise—in permanent products, in symbols and songs, in traditions and customs—an external heritage, which, it appears to us, has been the most potent factor in securing and furthering human evolution. ”

“ If we are to see life whole we must recognise these two sides of what we call living, and it is missing an important part of the history of animal life if we fail to see that evolution implies becoming more advantageously sensitive to the environment, making more of its influences, shutting out profitless stimuli, and opening more gateways to knowledge. The bird's world is a larger and finer world than an earthworm's; the world means more to the bird than to the worm. ”

“ Not only is it rational to infer that changes like those which have been going on during civilisation will continue to go on, but it is irrational to do otherwise. Not he who believes that adaptation will increase is absurd, but he who doubts that it will increase is absurd. Lack of faith in such further evolution of humanity as shall harmonise with its conditions adds but another to the countless illustrations of inadequate consciousness of causation. ”

“ We must imagine the colony of planets to which we belong as a compact little family swimming in an immense void. At distances which would take our shell, not hundreds, but millions [Pg 11] of years to traverse, we reach the stars—or rather, a star, for the distances between stars are as great as the distance between the nearest of them and our Sun. The Earth, the planet on which we live, is a mighty globe bounded by a crust of rock many miles in thickness; the great volumes of water which we call our oceans lie in the deeper hollows of the crust. ”

“ Naturalists, on the other hand, recognise that the Evolution-formula is no more than a genetic description, that it does not pretend to give any ultimate explanations, that as such it has nothing whatever to do with such transcendental concepts as almighty volition, and that it has no quarrel with the modern theological view of creation as the institution of the primary order of nature—the possibility of natural evolution included. Thus Spencer's destructive attack on the Special-Creation hypothesis has now little more than historical interest. ”