Science Quote by Oliver Joseph Lodge

Lodge writes like a man trying to smuggle a grenade past the gatekeepers of respectable science. The phrase "invincible prejudice" is doing the real work: it recasts skepticism not as rigor but as a kind of intellectual stubbornness, a refusal to look. He isn’t merely reporting an observation; he’s preemptively litigating the reaction, framing disagreement as a moral or psychological defect rather than an evidentiary dispute.

Context matters. Lodge was a serious physicist with serious credentials, living through an era when physics itself was detonating old certainties. X-rays, radioactivity, electrons: the late 19th and early 20th centuries made "impossible" a moving target. At the same time, Lodge was deeply involved in psychical research and spiritualism, especially after personal loss in World War I. That double exposure-to revolutionary science and to grief-charged belief-creates the quote's tension: it borrows the authority of scientific upheaval to launder claims that mainstream science found dubious.

The sentence structure performs neutrality while pushing a conclusion. "Any person... would come to the same" sounds democratic, almost Popper-ish, but it quietly assumes the experience is self-validating and transferable. The Latin "viz". adds an academic stamp, as if naming the conclusion makes it earned. Subtext: you may think you’re being critical, but you’re actually being provincial. Lodge is arguing that the boundary between the possible and impossible is policed less by nature than by the habits of an institution that prides itself on being unhabituated.