Certainty Ends Inquiry.

The Principle Of Tolerance, Fixed Once For All The Realization That All Knowledge Is Limited. It Is An Irony Of History That At The Very Time When This Was Being Worked Out, There Should Rise, Under Hitler In Germany And Other Tyrants Elsewhere, A Counter-conception: A Principle Of Monstrous Certainty. When The Future Looks Back On The 1930's, It Will Think Of Them As A Crucial Confrontation Of Culture As I Have Been Expounding It - The Ascent Of Man Against The Throwback To The Despots' Belief That They Have Absolute Certainty.

By The Worldly Standards Of Public Life, All Scholars In Their Work Are Of Course Oddly Virtuous. They Do Not Make Wild Claims, They Do Not Cheat, They Do Not Try To Persuade At Any Cost, They Appeal Neither To Prejudice Nor To Authority, They Are Often Frank About Their Ignorance, Their Disputes Are Fairly Decorous, They Do Not Confuse What Is Being Argued With Race, Politics, Sex Or Age, They Listen Patiently To The Young And To The Old Who Both Know Everything. These Are The General Virtues Of Scholarship, And They Are Peculiarly The Virtues Of Science.

[john] Dalton Was A Man Of Regular Habits. For Fifty-seven Years He Walked Out Of Manchester Every Day; He Measured The Rainfall, The Temperature-a Singularly Monotonous Enterprise In This Climate. Of All That Mass Of Data, Nothing Whatever Came. But Of The One Searching, Almost Childlike Question About The Weights That Enter The Construction Of These Simple Molecules-out Of That Came Modern Atomic Theory. That Is The Essence Of Science: Ask An Impertinent Question, And You Are On The Way To The Pertinent Answer.

Sex Was Invented As A Biological Instrument By (say) The Green Algae. But As An Instrument In The Ascent Of Man Which Is Basic To His Cultural Evolution, It Was Invented By Man Himself.

It Is Not The Business Of Science To Inherit The Earth, But To Inherit The Moral Imagination; Because Without That, Man And Beliefs And Science Will Perish Together.