Nothing has tended more to retard the advancement of science than the disposition in vulgar minds to vilify what they cannot comprehend.
Interpretation
People often hinder scientific progress when they criticize what they do not understand.
Samuel Johnson's quote emphasizes the detrimental effect that ignorance and skepticism can have on the advancement of science. He suggests that those who lack understanding often resort to disparagement as a defense mechanism, thereby impeding progress and the pursuit of knowledge. This reflects the broader theme of how openness to new ideas is essential for scientific discovery and innovation.
In practice
In a speech about embracing new scientific ideas, one might say, 'Remember, nothing has tended more to retard the advancement of science than the disposition in vulgar minds to vilify what they cannot comprehend.'
To be of no church is dangerous. Religion, of which the rewards are distant, and which is animated only by faith and hope, will glide by degrees out of the mind unless it be invigorated and reimpressed by external ordinances, by stated calls to worship, and the salutary influence of example.
He that reads and grows no wiser seldom suspects his own deficiency, but complains of hard words and obscure sentences, and asks why books are written which cannot be understood.
To let friendship die away by negligence and silence is certainly not wise. It is voluntarily to throw away one of the greatest comforts of the weary pilgrimage.
Fly-fishing may be a very pleasant amusement; but angling or float fishing I can only compare to a stick and a string, with a worm at one end and a fool at the other.
When any anxiety or gloom of the mind takes hold of you, make it a rule not to publish it by complaining; but exert yourselves to hide it, and by endeavoring to hide it you drive it away.
A fishing rod is a stick with a hook at one end and a fool at the other.
You can't tie a rope around the ice sheet. You can't build a wall around the ice sheets.
Given her deafness, the auditory part of the brain, deprived of its usual input, had started to generate a spontaneous activity of its own, and this took the form of musical hallucinations, mostly musical memories from her earlier life. The brain needed to stay incessantly active, and if it was not getting its usual stimulation..., it would create its own stimulation in the form of hallucinations.
I think that the discovery of antimatter was perhaps the biggest jump of all the big jumps in physics in our century.
I was always interested in figuring things out. I'd do experiments, like combining things I found around the house to see what would happen if I put them together.
Clearly, unless thinking beings inevitably wipe themselves out soon after developing technology, extraterrestrial intelligence could often be millions or billions of years in advance of us. We're the galaxy's noodling newbies.
The idea that you can ask one question and it makes the point - well, that wasn't how psychology was done at the time.
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