David Brewster: Quotes about life

David Brewster was British astronomer and mathematician. Explore interesting quotes on life.
David Brewster: 44   quotes 3   likes

“It is not within our province to inquire by what process, and in what condition the Almighty brought matter into existence-what the space was which it occupied, or what the forms were which it assumed. Of such things we know nothing. In the depths of primeval time, the globe we inhabit may have a planetary existence, wheeling along its ethereal railway without a breathing passenger to count its periods, and without a living plant to measure the day by its opening and closing blossoms, or to mark the rolling seasons by the yearly increments of its stem. Or it may have been the theatre on which vast cycles of animal and vegetable life have been run- now its birthplace, and now its grave: But we have no data to guide us in our conjectures, and even imagination fails us if we call it to our aid. Whatever may have been, had ceased to be at the commencement of our history, when the primary rocks, forming the moten nucleus of the globe, were first exposed to the action of the elements.”

David Brewster

Review of Vestiges (1845)

Life , Imagination , History , Time

“The cultivation of science is a luxury of no common kind amid the bustle and vexation of life, and is quite compatible with the most active professional duties. Your education and the example you have had to copy will, I am sure, guard you against those presumptuous and skeptical opinions which scientific knowledge too often engenders. In the ardour of pursuit and under the intoxication of success scientific men are apt to forget that they are the instrument by which Providence is gradually revealing the wonders of creation, and that they ought to exercise their functions with the same humility as those who are engaged in unfolding the mysteries of His revealed will.”

David Brewster

In a letter to James David Forbes, as found in Life and letters of James David Forbes, p. 39.

Life , Men , Education , Exercises

“Trained in a less severe school than that of geometry and physics, his reasonings are almost always loose and inconclusive. His generalizations seem to have been reached before he had obtained the materials upon which he rests them: His facts, though frequently new and interesting, are often little more than conjectures; and the grand phenomena of the world of life, and instinct, and reason, which other minds have woven into noble and elevating truths, have thus become in Mr. Darwin's hands the basis of a dangerous and degrading speculation.”

David Brewster

Referring to Charles Darwin
The facts and fancies of Mr. Darwin (1862)

Life , Truth , World , School

“It is God alone that can pronounce upon the real condition of the heart and soul, out of which are the issues of life. A true phrenological fact, therefore, which we can force a sound mind to believe must involve, in one of its aspects, a species of knowledge which ist is not in the power of man, and still less within his province, to attain; and in the other, a physical fact, which can be seen only in the brain itself, and which cannot be interfered from any external sign.”

David Brewster

Review of Vestiges (1845)

Life , God , Soul , Knowledge

“If it has been revealed to man that the Almighty made him out of the dust of the earth, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, it is in vain to tell a Christian that man was originally a speck of albumen, and passed through the stages of monads and monkeys, before he attained his present intellectual preeminence. If it be a received truth that the Creator has repeatedly interposed in the government of the universe and displayed his immediate agency in miraculous interpositions, it is an insult to any reader to tell him that the being slumbers on his throne and rules under a "primal arrangement in his counsels," and "by a code of laws of unbending operation."”

David Brewster

Review of Vestiges (1845)

Life , Truth , Law , Universe

“I would advise you not to expect too much happiness, even from the fulfillment of all your wishes. The moment you have distinguished yourself you become an object of envy and malice; men whom you believed to be lovers of knowledge you will then find to be lovers only of fame, and haters of all knowledge that has not come from themselves. You will find that a life of science has in it no superiority to any other, unless it is pursued from a higher principle than the mere ambition of notoriety, and that demagogue or a philosopher differ only in the objects of their selfishness. As you will now have experienced how unsatisfying even the pursuit of knowledge is when insulated from higher objects, I hope, if you have not been fortunate enough to begin the study earlier, that you will devote yourself to the most extraordinary of all subjects, one which infinitely surpasses the mechanism of the heavens or the chemistry of the material world, the revelation of your duty and the destiny of man as contained in The Bible — a book which occupied the best hours of the manhood of Newton, of Locke, and of Euler.”

David Brewster

In a 1830 letter to James David Forbes, as found in Life and letters of James David Forbes, p. 40.

Life , Men , Books , World