Extracts from Literature
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Extracts from Literature’
Sir Humphry Davy explains in simple terms what it is that leads to scientific progress.
In 1812, research chemist and popular lecturer Humphry Davy was knighted for his services to Science. In that same year, he published an overview of his discipline, Elements of Chemical Philosophy, and prefaced it with an introduction to the basics of the new scientific method. There were, he said, three essential components to it.
Sir Ector, who has searched fruitlessly for his brother for seven years, finds him at last, lying in state in the Joyous Gard.
At the close of Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, written in the reign of Edward IV (1461-1470), the deaths of King Arthur and Queen Guinevere have afflicted Sir Lancelot with such grief that he too has died. His half-brother Sir Ector, who had been searching for Lancelot seven years, came too late; but over Lancelot’s body, lying in state in the chapel of the fortress called the Joyous Gard, he spoke these words.
Those in Power may imagine that a docile and compliant public makes Government run more smoothly, but a society of that kind just won’t move forward.
John Stuart Mill was a firm believer in individual freedom, a conviction which led him to dissent from then-fashionable economic and social policy on women’s rights and American slavery. In On Liberty (1858), he warned politicians that a docile, on-message public might let the engine of State run more smoothly, but it will also rob it of any power to move forward.
Tom Pinch, who has seen at last what kind of man his apprentice-master Seth Pecksniff is, leaves Salisbury to seek a new life in London.
At the ripe old age of thirty-five, apprentice architect Tom Pinch has at last seen through his devious master Seth Pecksniff and is sitting on the box seat of the London coach, putting Salisbury behind him. And what a coach it is! Not simply a wooden carriage strapped to four horses, but a single organism, a living and breathing microcosm of London’s breathless glamour.
Even where freedom of speech and conscience are not curtailed by law, there is another kind of censorship that is just as destructive to progress.
In the 1850s, those who held opinions felt by Authority to be untrue, antisocial or extreme were still being frozen out of academic, political and commercial roles, not by law so much as by denying them preferments or a public platform. John Stuart Mill warned that such censorship would not silence dissent, but would nurture a generation so feeble-minded that progress itself would be slowed to a crawl.
Abusive language, straw-man arguments and downright ‘fake news’ should have no place in civilised debate, but censoring them is far worse.
Addressing the issue of freedom of speech, John Stuart Mill turned his attention in On Liberty to the use of uncivil discourse and what we now call ‘fake news’. He admitted both were disagreeable and even dangerous, but felt that no action should be taken to police them. Such action makes the Establishment into judge, jury and executioner, and honest dissent is declared a sign of bad or even criminal character.