Science Quote by Arthur Keith

Keith is quietly deflating the swagger of the expert class. By blaming civilization's slipperiness on its constant evolution and growing complexity, he offers a line that sounds like modest empiricism but lands as a critique: the world won't sit still long enough to be pinned to a neat definition, and the harder specialists try, the more their authority looks like a performance.

The intent is strategic. Keith, a scientist, frames the problem as methodological rather than philosophical. He isn't saying civilization is mystical; he's saying it's a moving target. That matters because it converts a potentially embarrassing failure (experts can't define the thing they study) into evidence of seriousness: if civilization keeps changing, the inability to define it becomes almost a proof of its vitality. The subtext: any definition is a snapshot mistaken for a portrait.

Context sharpens the edge. Writing in a period when anthropology, biology, and imperial politics all trafficked in hierarchies of "civilized" and "primitive", Keith's point implicitly undercuts civilizational scorekeeping. If civilization is "ever evolving", then the gatekeeping definitions used to justify dominance start to look arbitrary, time-bound, and self-serving. Complexity becomes an alibi for humility - and a warning against weaponized clarity.

Rhetorically, the sentence does its work through causal inevitability: "just because... that..". It sounds like common sense, which is precisely how it smuggles in skepticism. The line doesn't deny expertise; it repositions it as provisional, always lagging behind the messiness it wants to govern.