Into this, for good or ill, is woven every belief of every man who has speech of his fellows. A awful privilege, and an awful responsibility, that we should help to create the world in which posterity will live.
Interpretation
Our beliefs shape the world, and we have both the privilege and responsibility to influence future generations.
The quote by William Kingdon Clifford emphasizes the profound impact that our beliefs and actions have on the world and future generations. He suggests that communication and the exchange of ideas shape our collective reality, making it imperative for individuals to be mindful of their influence. This duality of privilege and responsibility indicates that while we have the power to effect change, we must also recognize the weight of that power and the obligation to create a better world for those who come after us.
In practice
Used in a speech about environmental stewardship to highlight our duty to future generations.
The aim of scientific thought, then, is to apply past experience to new circumstances; the instrument is an observed uniformity in the course of events. By the use of this instrument it gives us information transcending our experience, it enables us to infer things that we have not seen from things that we have seen; and the evidence for the truth of that information depends on our supposing that the uniformity holds good beyond our experience.
Remember that [scientific thought] is the guide of action; that the truth which it arrives at is not that which we can ideally contemplate without error, but that which we may act upon without fear; and you cannot fail to see that scientific thought is not an accompaniment or condition of human progress, but human progress itself.
This sense of power is the highest and best of pleasures when the belief on which it is founded is a true belief, and has been fairly earned by investigation.
We may always depend on it that algebra, which cannot be translated into good English and sound common sense, is bad algebra.
It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.
I've seen things you people wouldn't believe.
What has been forgotten is never something purely individual. Everything forgotten mingles with what has been forgotten of the prehistoric world, forms countless, uncertain, changing compounds, yielding a constant flow of new, strange products.
Imagine" he said, "never even thinking, 'We are alone,' simply because it has never occurred to you to think that there's any other way to be.
Human manners are wildly inconsistent; plenty of people have said so. But this one takes the cake: the manner in which we're allowed to steal from future generations, while commanding them not to do that to us, and rolling our eyes at anyone who is tediously PC enough to point that out. The conspicious consumption of limited resources has yet to be accepted widely as a spirtual error, or even bad manners.
Realism falls short of reality. It shrinks it, attenuates it, falsifies it; it does not take into account our basic truths and our fundamental obsessions: love, death, astonishment. It presents man in a reduced and estranged perspective. Truth is in our dreams, in the imagination.
The intelligent minority of this world will mark 1 January 2001 as the real beginning of the 21st century and the Third Millennium.
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