James Burnett, Lord Monboddo (1714 – 1799) was an eighteenth
century oddity in a century of oddities. A Scottish judge and linguistic scholar, he also propounded ideas of human development which were very much like an early form of
evolutionary theory. He was widely ridiculed for this departure from consensus
by among many others, James Boswell and Samuel Johnson.
Decades later, even Charles Dickens poked a stick at the memory
of Monboddo in his novel Martin
Chuzzlewit. Fifteen years after Chuzzlewit, Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was published and the consensus Johnson, Boswell and
Dickens supported was left behind.
Yet Johnson and Dickens are still well-known, and in the
case of Dickens, still famous, while Monboddo is much less widely known.
He [Samuel
Johnson] attacked Lord Monboddo’s strange
speculation on the primitive state of human nature, observing : “Sir, it is all
conjecture about a thing useless, even were it known to be true. Knowledge of
all kinds is good. Conjecture as to things useful is good; but conjecture as to
what it would be useless to know, such as whether men went upon all four, is
very idle.”
James Boswell – The Life of Samuel Johnson – published 1791
...it may be safely
asserted, and yet without implying any direct participation in the Monboddo
doctrine touching the probability of the human race having once been monkeys,
that men do play very strange and extraordinary tricks.
Charles Dickens – Martin Chuzzlewit serialized
1843 -1844
4 comments:
Gene Amdahl once said something like "It is no surprise pioneers mostly get shot in the back".
Always easier to knock an idea than to have one.
rogerh - yes the one who gets the discussion off the ground does the most difficult job and often isn't around to claim the credit if it finally comes to something.
If I may add:
'Committees are dark alleyways into which good ideas are lured and then quietly strangled'.
rogerh - superb. Who said it?
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