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“I do not believe in belief. But this is the age of faith (1939-40), where one is surrounded by so many militant creeds that, in self-defence, one has to formulate a creed of one’s own. . . . Tolerance, good temper and sympathy, well they are what matter really. . .”
- E. M. Forster, the novelist, who wrote in his 70s,
a book of essays, ‘Two Cheers for Democracy’.
“. . . Who or what rules the universe? So far as I can see, it rules itself, and indeed the whole analogy with a country and its ruler is false. Even if a god does exist behind or above the universe as we experience it, we can have no knowledge of such a power: the actual gods of historical religions are only the personifications of impersonal facts of nature and the facts of our inner mental life. . .
“Here is a philosophy in tabloid. Reality is something that happens. Nothing just exists in its own right. There is nothing behind nature, though there is infinitely more in nature than we know at present. There is no supernatural, and nothing metaphysical. Our minds are real, but there was matter before there was mind. The sensations and thoughts in our minds mirror reality, though imperfectl;y. We are always getting nearer to absolute truth, but never get all the way. . .
“ The question, ‘What is the nature of God?’ we cannot answer, since we have no means of knowing whether such a being exists or not.”
- Julian Huxley, populiser of science, whose books in first half of 20th century
included shared authorship with H G Wells, J B S Haldane and others..
“What I believe is surprisingly simple. . . At birth I was provided with a small quantity of that cosmic energy which is the substance out of which our universe is made. Some of those small quantities of energy were given the shape of plants, while others were disguised as weeds. Some of them were used to give us the figure of a Thomas Jefferson or a Goethe or Pasteur, while others but served as the physical containers for the destructive energies of a Napoleon or Genghis Khan or the contemptible foulness of a Goebbels. But since that is the way nature seems to have chosen to perform her miracles, it is not up to us to find fault with this arrangement but rather to see what we ourselves can make of that temporary loan from the vast reservoir of energy which is the beginning and end of all things, from Betelgeuse to the microbe who some day will destroy us.”
- Hendrik Willem van Loon, who wrote ‘The story of Mankind’ in the 1920s,
and entertained and enlightened a whole generation of kids, including me.
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