Science & Tech Quote by Bertrand Russell

Russell isn’t praising science so much as disciplining modernity’s ego. The line flattens our favorite story about progress - that the nineteenth century’s steam, the twentieth century’s electricity, the twenty-first’s silicon are the “real” revolutions - and points the camera back to a less glamorous century of telescopes, falling apples, and arguments about method. His intent is corrective: to insist that what we call “the modern world” is not primarily a shift in taste, politics, or morals, but a shift in how knowledge is produced and trusted.

The subtext is a jab at sentimental histories that treat modernity as a cultural awakening. Russell, the philosopher of logic and a connoisseur of intellectual error, is saying: you can keep your Renaissance romance; the machinery of modern life runs on a deeper invention - the scientific habit of mind. “Almost everything” is strategically overstated, not because he thinks art and religion vanish, but because he wants to make causality sting: science didn’t just add gadgets, it rewired authority. It moved legitimacy from tradition and revelation to reproducible demonstration.

Context matters. Writing in a century scarred by industrialized war and ideological fanaticism, Russell had reason to defend science’s cognitive virtues while remaining alert to its moral neutrality. Anchoring the “most spectacular triumphs” in the seventeenth century (Galileo, Bacon, Descartes, Newton) also lets him separate discovery from later deployment. The triumph is methodological: a new way of asking questions that made everything else - factories, medicine, bureaucracy, even skepticism itself - feel inevitable.