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I. Frost's Selected Quotations
Everything at Amazon by and about: Charles DarwinIt is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent; it is the one that is most adaptable to change I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term Natural Selection. Physiological experiment on animals is justifiable for real investigation, but not for mere damnable and detestable curiosity A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life. It appears to me (whether rightly or wrongly) that direct arguments against Christianity and theism produce hardly any effect on the public; and freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men's minds which follows from the advance of science I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created parasitic wasps with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science The expression often used by Mr. Herbert Spencer, of the Survival of the Fittest, is more accurate, and is sometimes equally convenient I must begin with a good body of facts and not from a principle (in which I always suspect some fallacy) and then as much deduction as you please It is a cursed evil to any man to become as absorbed in any subject as I am in mine The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us, and I for one must be content to remain an agnostic A mathematician is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat which isn't there If the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference When I view all beings not as special creations, but as the lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Cambrian system was deposited, they seem to me to become ennobled I love fools' experiments. I am always making them. Man is descended from a hairy, tailed quadruped, probably arboreal in its habits I am aware that the assumed instinctive belief in God has been used by many persons as an argument for his existence. The idea of a universal and beneficent Creator does not seem to arise in the mind of man, until he has been elevated by long-continued culture To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I confess, absurd in the highest degree As for a future life, every man must judge for himself between conflicting vague probabilities Probably all organic beings which have ever lived on this earth have descended from some one primordial form, into which life was first breathed. There is grandeur in this view of life that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved The fact of evolution is the backbone of biology, and biology is thus in the peculiar position of being a science founded on an improved theory, is it then a science or faith In the struggle for survival, the fittest win out at the expense of their rivals because they succeed in adapting themselves best to their environment I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me About thirty years ago there was much talk that geologists ought only to observe and not theorize; and I well remember someone saying that at this rate a man might as well go into a gravel-pit and count the pebbles and describe the colours. How odd it is that anyone should not see that allobservation must be for or against some view if it is to be of any service! What a book a Devil's Chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering low and horribly cruel works of nature With respect to the theological view of the question. This is always painful to me. I am bewildered. I had no intention to write atheistically. But I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice Doing what little one can to increase the general stock of knowledge is as respectable an object of life, as one can in any likelihood pursue When it was first said that the sun stood still and world turned round, the common sense of mankind declared the doctrine false; but the old saying of Vox populi, vox Dei [the voice of the people is the voice of God], as every philosopher knows, cannot be trusted in science Man with all his noble qualities, with sympathy which feels for the most debased, with benevolence which extends not only to other men but to the humblest living creature, with his god-like intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system- with all these exalted powers- Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin A scientific man ought to have no wishes, no affections, a mere heart of stone 4
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