Science & Tech Quote by Thomas Love Peacock

Peacock’s line lands like a genteel parlor joke with a concealed blade: the “ultimate destiny of science” isn’t progress, comfort, or enlightenment, but extermination. The wicked pleasure is in how calmly he frames apocalypse as a career path. “Almost think” is doing heavy work here, a faux-modest hedge that lets him sound reasonable while floating a scandalous conclusion. It’s the rhetorical equivalent of raising an eyebrow and watching the room argue with itself.

The intent isn’t anti-knowledge so much as anti-complacency. Peacock was writing in a Britain intoxicated by early industrial modernity, when “science” was less lab coat than social religion: a rising authority promising mastery over nature, efficiency over tradition, and systems over messy human judgment. His satire needles the Victorian faith that technique automatically equals virtue. If science is treated as an end in itself, divorced from ethics and politics, then its “destiny” isn’t wisdom; it’s escalation.

The subtext is that extermination doesn’t require mad scientists; it requires ordinary incentives. Discovery becomes power, power becomes competition, competition becomes a logic that outruns restraint. Peacock compresses that whole chain into a single, icy sentence, making the reader confront an uncomfortable possibility: the threat isn’t that science malfunctions, but that it works-too well-for whoever gets to aim it.

In Peacock’s hands, the joke is also a warning: a society that worships “progress” without asking progress toward what may eventually get exactly what it asked for.