Organic life, we are told, has developed gradually from the protozoon to the philosopher, and this development, we are assured, is indubitably an advance. Unfortunately it is the philosopher, not the protozoon, who gives us this assurance.
Interpretation
This quote critiques the idea that human evolution is unequivocally an advance, highlighting the subjective nature of such assessments.
Bertrand Russell's quote reflects on the evolution of organic life, emphasizing that the notion of progress from protozoa to philosophers is primarily constructed by the philosophers themselves. This perspective prompts us to question the validity of declaring any stage of development as superior, suggesting that such judgments may be biased and self-serving, as they arise from a more advanced but possibly flawed viewpoint.
In practice
In a discussion about scientific advancements and their impact on society, this quote could highlight the subjective interpretation of progress.
St. Paul introduced an entirely novel view of marriage, that it existed primarily to prevent the sin of fornication. It is just as if one were to maintain that the sole reason for baking bread is to prevent people from stealing cake.
Freedom comes only to those who no longer ask of life that it shall yield them any of those personal goods that are subject to the mutations of time.
Of these austerer virtues the love of truth is the chief, and in mathematics, more than elsewhere, the love of truth may find encouragement for waning faith. Every great study is not only an end in itself, but also a means of creating and sustaining a lofty habit of mind; and this purpose should be kept always in view throughout the teaching and learning of mathematics.
At all times, except when a monarch could enforce his will, war has been facilitated by the fact that vigorous males, confident of victory, enjoyed it, while their females admired them for their prowess.
Moreover, the attitude that one ought to believe such and such a proposition, independently of the question whether there is evidence in its favor, is an attitude which produces hostility to evidence and causes us to close our minds to every fact that does not suit our prejudices.
Extreme hopes are born from extreme misery.
One of the troubles of our times is that we are all, I think, precocious as personalities and backward as characters.
Nothing is beautiful, only man: on this piece of naivete rests all aesthetics, it is the first truth of aesthetics. Let us immediately add its second: nothing is ugly but degenerate man - the domain of aesthetic judgment is therewith defined.
We come into the world alone and we die alone. Why, in life, should we be any less alone?
At a certain level of suffering or injustice no one can do anything for anyone. Pain is solitary.
Things are as they are. Looking out into it the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations.
Standards of beauty describe in precise terms the relationship that an individual will have to her own body. They prescribe her mobility, spontaneity, posture, gait, the uses to which she can use her body. They define precisely the dimension of her physical freedom and psychological development, intellectual possibility, and creative potential is an umbilical one.
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