David Brewster Quotes

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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
In our daily walks we tread with heedless step upon the apparently uninteresting objects of which it [geology] treats; but could we rightly interrogate the rounded pebble in our path, it would tell us of the convulsions by which it was wrenched from its parent rock, and of the floods by which it was abraded and placed beneath our feet.

David Brewster
If the God of Love is most appropriately worshiped in the Christian Temple, the God of Nature may be equally honoured in the Temple of science.

David Brewster
It is often some hidden relation, some deep-seated affinity, which is required to complete, or rather to constitute, a great discovery; and this relation is often discovered among the wildest conceptions and fancies after they have been sobered down by the application of experiment and observation.

David Brewster
There is no subject within the whole range of knowledge so universally interesting as that of a Plurality of Worlds. It commands the sympathies, and appeals to the judgment of men of all nations, of all creeds, and of all times; and no sooner do we comprehend the few simple facts on which it rests, than the mind rushes instinctively to embrace it.

David Brewster
A collection of facts, however skillfully they may be conjured with, can never yield general laws unless they contain that master-fact in which the discovery resides, or upon which the law mainly depends.

David Brewster
Had the moon been destined to be merely a lamp to our earth, there was no occasion to variegate its surface with lofty mountains and valleys and extinct volcanoes, and cover it with large patches of matter, that reflect different quantities of light, and give its surface the appearance of continents and seas.

David Brewster
Interesting as has been the past history of our race, - engrossing as must ever be the present, - the future, more exciting still, mingles itself with every thought and sentiment, and casts its beams of hope, or its shadows of fear, over the stage both of active and contemplative life.

David Brewster
'Wherever there is matter there must be Life; Life Physical to enjoy its beauties - Life Moral to worship its Maker, and Life Intellectual to proclaim His wisdom and His power.

David Brewster
Prophetic of infidel times, and indicating the unsoundness of our general education, 'The Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation', has started into public favour with a fair chance of poisoning the fountains of science, and sapping the foundations of religion.

David Brewster
Though the large runt pigeon, with its massive beak and its huge feet, differs from its blue and barred progenitor the rock, it is a pigeon still. Though the slender Italian greyhound has a strange contrast with the short-legged bull-dog, they are both dogs in their teeth and in their skull. The mouse, even, has not been transmuted into the cat, nor the hen into the turkey, nor the duck into the goose, nor the hawk into the eagle, and still less the monkey into the man.

David Brewster
Man, made after God's image, was a nobler creation than twinkling sparks in the sky, or than the larger and more useful lamp of the moon.

David Brewster
The human voice may be denominated the music of the mind; language, a figurative mode of expressing our ideas and sentiments. The effects of flowing from this beneficent endowment are overwhelming in contemplation and almost infinite in extent. It is principally instrumental to all the moral and physical improvements of man, and enables him to pour forth his otherwise invisible, inaudible, unfathomable thoughts, to his fellow-man and to his God.

David Brewster
Truth has no greater enemy than its unwise defenders, and no warmer friends than those who, receiving it in a meek and tolerant spirit, respect the conscientious convictions of others, and seek, in study and in prayer, for the best solution of mysterious and incomprehensible revelations.

David Brewster
Had Mr. Darwin written a work on the change of species, as determined by observation and experiment, without any other object but that of advancing natural science, he would have obtained a high place among philosophical naturalists. But after reading his work in which the name of the Creator is never distinctly mentioned, we can hardly believe that scientific truth was the only object the author had in view. Researches, conducted under the influence of other motives, are not likely to stand the test of a rigorous scrutiny; and some of Mr. Darwin's not unfriendly critics have produced ample evidence that the idol of speculation has been occasionally worshipped at the expense of truth.

David Brewster
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
There is no profession so incompatible with original enquiry as is a Scotch Professorship, where one's income depends on the numbers of pupils. Is there one Professor in Edinburgh pursuing science with zeal? Are they not all occupied as showmen whose principal object is to attract pupils and make money?

David Brewster
It is not easy to devise a cure for such a state of things (the declining taste for science). The most obvious remedy is to provide the educated classes with a series of works on popular and practical science, freed from mathematical symbols and technical terms, written in simple and perspicuous language, and illustrated by facts and experiments which are level to the capacity of ordinary minds.

David Brewster
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
It is a more rational belief that man may become a brute than that a brute may become a man; and it is an easier faith that plants and animals may dwindle down into an elemental atom, than that this atom should embrace in its organization, and evolve, all the noble forms of vegetable, animal, and intellectual life.

David Brewster
A mere inference or theory must give way to a truth revealed; but a scientific truth must be maintained, however contradictory it may appear to the most cherished doctrines of religion.

David Brewster
Although every part of the human frame has been fashioned by the same Divine hand and exhibits the most marvellous and beneficent adaptions for the use of men, the human eye stands pre-eminent above them all as the light of the body and the organ by which we become acquainted with the minutest and the nearest, the largest and most remote of the Creator's work

David Brewster
Thus identified with astronomy, in proclaiming truths supposed to be hostile to Scripture, Geology has been denounced as the enemy of religion. The twin sisters of terrestrial and celestial physics have thus been joint-heirs of intolerance and persecution — unresisting victims in the crusade which ignorance and fanaticism are ever waging against science.

David Brewster
Jesus will take me safe trough... I shall see Jesus, who created all things, Jesus, who made the worlds; I shall see Him as He is;... Yes; I have had the Light for many years, and Oh! how bright it is! I feel SO SAFE, SO SATISFIED.

David Brewster
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
When great truths are driven to make an appeal to reason, knowledge becomes criminal, and philosophers martyrs. Truth, however, like all moral powers, can neither be checked nor extinguished. When compressed, it but reacts the more. It crushes where it cannot expand — it burns where it is not allowed to shine.

David Brewster
Truths physical have an- origin as divine as truths religious, In the time of Galileo they triumphed over the casuistry and secular power of the Church ; and in our own day the incontrovertible truths of primeval life have won as noble a victory over the errors of a speculative theology, and a false interpretation of the word of God. Science ever has been, and ever must be the safeguard of religion. The grandeur of her truths may transcend our failing reason, but those who cherish and lean upon truths equally grand, but certainly more incomprehensible, ought to see in the marvels of the material world the best defence and illustration of the mysteries of their faith.

David Brewster