Science Quote by Adam Sedgwick

Sedgwick’s jab lands with the chill of a sermon delivered in a lab coat: “cold,” “atheistical,” “materialism” isn’t just a description, it’s a moral diagnosis. Writing as a leading geologist in a century when “material philosophy” was starting to sound like the future, Sedgwick is trying to frame a rising intellectual fashion as not merely wrong, but spiritually and socially corrosive. The phrase “so-called” does heavy lifting. It delegitimizes his opponents’ self-branding, implying that what parades as sober science is actually a metaphysical smuggle: an attempt to explain life, mind, and meaning as nothing but matter in motion.

The intent is defensive, but not anti-scientific in any simple way. Sedgwick helped build the very empirical culture he’s policing; his worry is about jurisdiction. Geology and natural history were expanding the timeline of the Earth and destabilizing traditional readings of Genesis. In that atmosphere, materialist explanations could feel less like a method and more like a takeover bid on the entire moral order. By attaching “atheistical” to “materialism,” Sedgwick warns that the stakes aren’t confined to textbooks. If nature is all there is, he suggests, then values become optional, conscience becomes chemistry, and human dignity becomes an accident.

It works rhetorically because it weaponizes tone as evidence. “Cold” insinuates that materialism isn’t just false; it’s emotionally deformed, incapable of awe, gratitude, or obligation. Sedgwick’s subtext: science without metaphysical restraint doesn’t just explain the world; it reeducates people into a thinner, harsher way of living in it.