Science Quote by Arthur Keith

Keith writes like a scientist trying to smuggle a moral argument into the neutral language of observation. “Civilization never stands still” is posed as a law of motion: progress isn’t a choice, it’s a condition. The trick is that he immediately makes the law comparative and competitive. If one country “is falling back,” another is “changing, evolving,” piling on complexity and “fresh experience.” Civilization becomes less a shared human project than a global relay race, with nations alternately advancing and dropping the baton.

The subtext is early 20th-century anxiety dressed up as evolutionary common sense. Words like “evolving” and “breeding” borrow authority from biology, implying that social change is natural, inevitable, and measurable - which conveniently sidelines questions about who benefits, who gets harmed, and who gets to define “falling back.” In Keith’s lifetime, empires justified themselves as engines of “development.” Framing some places as dynamically evolving while others regress echoes that imperial hierarchy, even if the sentence never names it.

Then comes the pivot: “exploiting Nature’s cupboard for their satisfaction.” “Cupboard” is domestic, comforting, as if the planet were a well-stocked pantry; “exploiting” is blunt, almost celebratory. He captures a modern paradox: complexity and desire feed each other, and the means of feeding them is extraction. Civilization is described as an appetite that learns new tastes and invents new hungers - a neat explanation for innovation, and a quiet warning about its costs.