Herbert Butterfield
(7 Oct 1900 - 20 Jul 1979)
English historian and philosopher of history who, as a major Christian thinker, was concerned by an unending tension between history, science and God.
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Science Quotes by Herbert Butterfield (5 quotes)
[The Whig interpretation of history] ... is the tendency in many historians to write on the side of Protestants and Whigs, to praise revolutions provided they have been successful, to emphasise certain principles of progress in the past and to produce a story which is the ratification if not the glorification of the present.
— Herbert Butterfield
The Whig Interpretation of History (1931), v.
[There was] in some of the intellectual leaders a great aspiration to demonstrate that the universe ran like a piece of clock-work, but this was was itself initially a religious
aspiration. It was felt that there would be something defective in Creation itself—something not quite worthy of God—unless the whole system of the universe could be shown to be interlocking, so that it carried the pattern of reasonableness and orderliness. Kepler, inaugurating the scientist’s quest for a mechanistic universe in the seventeenth century, is significant here—his mysticism, his music of the spheres, his rational deity demand a system which has the beauty of a piece of mathematics.
— Herbert Butterfield
In The Origins of Modern Science (1950), 105.
Concerning alchemy it is more difficult to discover the actual state of things, in that the historians who specialise in this field seem sometimes to be under the wrath of God themselves; for, like those who write of the Bacon-Shakespeare controversy or on Spanish politics, they seem to become tinctured with the kind of lunacy they set out to describe.
— Herbert Butterfield
The Origins of Modern Science (1949), 115.
The so-called “scientific revolution,” popularly associated with the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but reaching back in an unmistakably continuous line to a period much earlier still. Since that revolution overturned the authority in science not only of the middle ages but of the ancient world—since it ended not only in the eclipse of scholastic philosophy but in the destruction of Aristotelian physics—it outshines everything since the rise of Christianity and reduces the Renaissance and Reformation to the rank of mere episodes, mere internal displacements, within the system of medieval Christendom … It looms so large as the real origin of the modern world and of the modern mentality that our customary periodisation of European history has become an anachronism and an encumbrance.
— Herbert Butterfield
The Origins of Modern Science (1949), viii.
The study of the past with one eye, so to speak, upon the present is the source of all sins and sophistries in history … It is the essence of what we mean by the word “unhistorical”.
— Herbert Butterfield
In The Whig Interpretation of History (1931), 31-2.
See also:
- The Life and Thought of Herbert Butterfield: History, Science and God, by Michael Bentley. - book suggestion.