“The causes of production of great men lie in a sphere wholly inaccessible to the social philosopher. He must simply accept geniuses as data, just as Darwin accepts his spontaneous variations. For him, as for Darwin, the only problem is, these date being given, how does the environment affect them, and how do they affect the environment? Now, I affirm that the relation of the visible environment to the great man is in the main exactly what it is to the "variation" in the Darwinian philosophy. It chiefly adopts or rejects, preserves or destroys, in short selects him. And whenever it adopts and preserves the great man, it becomes modified by his influence in an entirely original and peculiar way. He acts as a ferment, and changes its constitution, just as the advent of a new zoölogical species changes the faunal and floral equilibrium of the region in which it appears.” (James 1980, Great Men, Great Thoughts, and the Environment, p. 445)
"Het grondbeginsel van alle kennis is dat het gekende ding niet zomaar het gekende ding is, dat de dingen niet zijn wat zij zijn en aanvankelijk bleken te zijn, maar zelfs niet wat ze zullen blijken te zijn." (Cornelis Verhoeven, Inleiding tot de Verwondering, p. 27)
"Wie wil leven, moet vechten, en wie in deze wereld van eeuwige strijd niet vechten wil, die zal het leven niet kunnen houden, want hij verdient het niet. En zelfs wanneer dit wreed was, dan zullen wij het toch hebben te aanvaarden, omdat de toestanden nu eenmaal zo zijn, en niet anders. Maar zeker is wel, dat het wreedste lot dat is van de man, die zich verbeeldt, dat hij de natuur zou kunnen overwinnen, en haar in werkelijkheid alleen maar bespot." (p. 358)
"A foreign publisher of my first book [The Selfish Gene (1976)] confessed that he could not sleep for
three nights after reading it, so troubled was he by what he saw as its
cold, bleak message. Others have asked me how I can bear to get up in
the mornings. A teacher from a distant country wrote to me reproachfully
that a pupil had come to him in tears after reading the same book,
because it had persuaded her that life was empty and purposeless. He
advised her not to show the book to any of her friends, for fear of
contaminating them with the same nihilistic pessimism. Similar
accusations of barren desolation, of promoting an arid and joyless
message, are frequently flung at science in general, and it is easy for
scientists to play up to them. My colleague Peter Atkins begins his book
The Second Law (1984) in this vein:
We are the children of chaos, and the deep structure of change is decay.
At root, there is only corruption, and the unstemmable tide of chaos.
Gone is purpose; all that is left is direction. this is the bleakness we have
to accept as we peer deeply and dispassionately into the heart of the
Universe.
But such very proper purging of saccharine false purpose; such laudable
tough-mindedness in the debunking of cosmic sentimentality must not
be confused with a loss of personal hope. Presumably there is indeed no
purpose in the ultimate fate of the cosmos, but do any of us really tie our
life's hopes to the ultimate fate of the cosmos anyway? Of course we don't;
not if we are sane. Our lives are ruled by all sorts of closer, warmer,
human ambitions and perceptions." (Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow, p. 9)
"We have the impression that invention, intention, and conscious decision making play a crucial part in crafting our humanity, but perhaps that just isn't so." (Hughes 2011, On the Origin of Tepees, p. 96)
