Science Quote by Arthur Keith

"I am a rank individualist" lands like a self-issued warning label: not merely independent, but unapologetically so. The word "rank" is doing the heavy lifting. It signals something full-strength, even a little abrasive, as if Keith is conceding that his temperament has an odor to polite company. This is not the romantic individualism of the solitary genius; it’s a declaration of method and posture, a refusal to be sorted into someone else’s program.

Coming from Arthur Keith, a scientist best known for anatomy and human origins, the line sits inside an early-20th-century intellectual world where "the social" was increasingly scientific territory. The era’s big frameworks - nationalism, imperial bureaucracy, the emerging welfare state, the booming authority of institutions - all invited thinkers to explain humans in aggregates: races, classes, populations, systems. Keith’s insistence on being a "rank individualist" reads as both a personal brand and a defensive maneuver against that pull. He’s staking out the right to dissent, to follow evidence or intuition even when consensus hardens into orthodoxy.

The subtext is political without needing party labels: skepticism toward collectivist moral pressure, suspicion of committee truth, impatience with the idea that a person’s value is best understood through group identity. It also quietly flatters the speaker. Individualism here isn’t just freedom; it’s status - the implication that he can stand alone because he has the spine (and perhaps the authority) to do it. In a scientific culture that prizes dispassionate objectivity, Keith’s blunt self-description admits something more human: science is practiced by personalities, and some personalities refuse to be domesticated.