Literary and Historical Miscellanies (1855), The Necessity, the Reality, and the Promise of the Progress of the Human Race (1854)
Context: No science has been reached, no thought generated, no truth discovered, which has not from all time existed potentially in every human mind. The belief in the progress of the race does not, therefore, spring from the supposed possibility of his acquiring new faculties, or coming into the possession of a new nature.
Still less does truth vary. They speak falsely who say that truth is the daughter of time; it is the child of eternity, and as old as the Divine mind. The perception of it takes place in the order of time; truth itself knows nothing of the succession of ages. Neither does morality need to perfect itself; it is what it always has been, and always will be. Its distinctions are older than the sea or the dry land, than the earth or the sun. The relation of good to evil is from the beginning, and is unalterable.
“Truth is child of time.”
Act IV, sc. iii.
The Broken Heart (c. 1625-33)
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John Ford (dramatist) 33
dramatist 1586–1639Related quotes
As quoted in Gems of Thought (1888) edited by Charles Northend
Source: Father and Child Reunion (2001), p. 187.
“Perfection is the child of time…”
Quo vadis? A just Censure of Travel (1617).
Narrator
A Child is Born (1942)
“You might as well answer the door, my child,
the truth is furiously knocking.”
Source: Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir 1969-1980