Love & Passion Quote by Thomas Huxley

Huxley takes a Victorian fantasy of moral perfection and turns it into a dare: if Truth and Rightness could be guaranteed by an external mechanism, he would sign up on the spot. The joke is not that he wants to be a machine; its edge is that he knows how tempting that bargain is, especially for an age drunk on progress, systems, and the new prestige of scientific authority. He puts the bait in plain sight: who wouldnt want certainty, clean conscience, no self-doubt?

Then he punctures it with the image of being "a sort of clock", wound up before breakfast. Its a deliberately undignified metaphor for a supposedly noble aim. Morality, he implies, is not just correct outputs. It is struggle, error, revision, the very friction that makes ethical life human rather than automated. The subtext is a warning against any institution, church, party, or even scientific culture, that promises to relieve you of the burden of judgment. A "great Power" that can guarantee your thoughts is also a power that owns them.

Context matters: Huxley, Darwins bulldog, spent his career defending scientific inquiry against dogma. Here, he is skeptical not only of religious certainty but of any seductive system that turns conscience into a routine. The line works because it flatters our desire for moral convenience while exposing its cost: if you outsource your thinking, you might get correctness, but you lose agency. The protest is really a confession about human weakness, sharpened into a critique of moral automation.