Science & Tech Quote by John Burroughs

Burroughs isn’t trying to pick a bar fight between lab coats and clergy; he’s drawing a boundary line around what kind of claims modern life is willing to bankroll. “Sole guide” and “hold fast” are doing the heavy lifting here: he frames science less as a toolbox than as a moral discipline, a code of intellectual hygiene. If you accept only what can be verified, then theology isn’t merely wrong - it becomes unserious, a category error. The quiet audacity is that he treats verification not as one option among many, but as the adulthood of thought.

The phrase “old theology” is a tell. Burroughs isn’t declaring war on every form of faith or spiritual longing; he’s aiming at inherited systems that ask for assent without evidence and then claim authority over the natural world. Coming from a late-19th-century American writer closely associated with nature writing, Darwin’s aftershocks, and the era’s confidence in progress, the line reads like a cultural weather report: the climate has changed, and doctrines built for a pre-scientific cosmos are not going to survive the new pressure.

The subtext is also political. “Verifiable” sounds neutral, but it’s an argument about who gets to arbitrate reality. Once verification is the standard, institutional religion loses its monopoly on explanation, education, and public morality. Burroughs offers no compromise because the drama of the sentence depends on inevitability: accept the premise, and the conclusion (“must go”) arrives like a verdict, not a debate.