"Pascal said that most of the evils of life arose from 'man's being unable to sit still in a room'; and though I do not go that length, it is certain that we should have been a far wiser race than we are if we had been readier to sit quiet -- we should have known much better the way in which it was best to act when we come to act...
If it had not been for quiet people, who sat still and studied the sections of the cone..., or other quiet people had not sat still and worked out the doctrine of chances..., if idle 'star-gazers' had not watched long and carefully the motions of the heavenly bodies -- our modern astronomy, 'our ships, our colonies, our seamen,' all which makes modern life could not have existed.
Ages of sedentary, quiet, thinking people were required before that noisy existence began, and without those pale preliminary students it never could have been brought into being. And 9/10's of modern science is in this respect the same: It is the produce of men whom their contemporaries thought dreamers -- who were believed to be useless, if anyone could be such.
And the conclusion, plain and simple that if there had been more such people, if the world had not laughed at those there were, if rather it had encouraged them, there would have been a greet accumulation of proved science ages before there was.
It was the irritable activity, the 'wish to be doing something' that prevented it. Most men inherited a nature too eager and too restless to be quiet and find out things; and even worse -- with their idle clamor they disturbed the brooding hen; they would not let those be quiet who wished to be so, and out of whose calm thought much good might have come forth."
--Walter Bagehot
If it had not been for quiet people, who sat still and studied the sections of the cone..., or other quiet people had not sat still and worked out the doctrine of chances..., if idle 'star-gazers' had not watched long and carefully the motions of the heavenly bodies -- our modern astronomy, 'our ships, our colonies, our seamen,' all which makes modern life could not have existed.
Ages of sedentary, quiet, thinking people were required before that noisy existence began, and without those pale preliminary students it never could have been brought into being. And 9/10's of modern science is in this respect the same: It is the produce of men whom their contemporaries thought dreamers -- who were believed to be useless, if anyone could be such.
And the conclusion, plain and simple that if there had been more such people, if the world had not laughed at those there were, if rather it had encouraged them, there would have been a greet accumulation of proved science ages before there was.
It was the irritable activity, the 'wish to be doing something' that prevented it. Most men inherited a nature too eager and too restless to be quiet and find out things; and even worse -- with their idle clamor they disturbed the brooding hen; they would not let those be quiet who wished to be so, and out of whose calm thought much good might have come forth."
--Walter Bagehot
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