Joseph Priestley Quotes
In completing one discovery we never fail to get an imperfect knowledge of others.
Priestley, Joseph. Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air. Vol. 1, J. Johnson, 1774, p. vii.
Sir Humphry was a religious man, and yet he focused on one of the great differences between science and religion. The latter is presumed true and eternal by its faithful, while science is never such. No truth is eternal in science and rarely does a scientific “truth” last 100 years without modification, elaboration or additional complexity. This is one of the reasons that scientists make poor witnesses at Congressional hearings. They are never certain of anything if they are good scientists. Witnesses from other fields testify with much more certainty as they are motivated by self interest or ideology where doubt is unacceptable.
It was not very long before there was no scientific field any longer in which any human being could learn everything that is known. Sherrington was one of the first to see that coming.
Joseph Priestley FRS was an English chemist, natural philosopher, separatist theologian, grammarian, multi-subject educator, and liberal political theorist who published over 150 works. He has historically been credited with the discovery of oxygen, having isolated it in its gaseous state, although Carl Wilhelm Scheele and Antoine Lavoisier also have strong claims to the discovery, Scheele having discovered it in 1772, two years before Priestley.
