Speech upon receiving the Freedom of the Burgh of Inverness, Scotland (13 June 1930), published in This Torch of Freedom (1935), pp. 191-192.
1930
“Evolution throws a wonderful light on all the struggles, eccentricities, tortuous developments of the human conscience in the past. It is the only theory of morals that does. And evolution throws just as much light on the ethical and social struggle today; and it is the only theory that does. What a strange age ours is from the religious point of view! What a hopeless age from the philosopher's point of view! Yet it is a very good age, the best that ever was. No evolutionist is a pessimist.”
The Human Origin of Morals http://www.positiveatheism.org/hist/mccabe02.htm (1926), p. 59.
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Joseph McCabe 9
British writer 1867–1955Related quotes
Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey (2014)
Source: Why Darwin Matters: The Case Against Intelligent Design
Pico Della Mirandola
The Renaissance http://www.authorama.com/renaissance-1.html (1873)
Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 64
“Ethical individualism… is spiritualized theory of evolution carried over into moral life.”
Philosophy of Freedom, Chapter 12
Faraday Lecture, the Royal Institution, London (1889) as quoted by Leon Gray, The Basics of the Periodic Table (2013)
Source: Paths to Otherwhere (1996), Ch. 38
Context: It turns out that information leaks between universes at the quantum level. We think it accounts for all kinds of phenomena, from what drives evolution to strange insights and mystical experiences through the ages. The machine was built as an attempt to investigate and amplify them.
Paul Bernays, Platonism in mathematics http://sites.google.com/site/ancientaroma2/book_platonism.pdf (1935)