Science Quote by Thomas Huxley

Huxley is doing what he did best: puncturing the Victorian faith that humans are basically reasonable creatures who occasionally get tempted into error. He flips the comfort story. “Rational grounds” aren’t the clean foundations of belief; they’re frequently the polished alibis we draft after the verdict has already been reached somewhere deeper. The real target isn’t logic as a tool, but logic as theater.

The line works because of its sly reordering of cause and effect. We like to imagine beliefs built upward from evidence, brick by brick. Huxley suggests the opposite: instinct lays the foundation, and reason arrives later with paperwork. The phrase “extremely irrational attempts” is intentionally abrasive: it frames rationalization not as a minor bias but as a kind of self-deception with a high IQ. The insult lands precisely because it’s plausible. Anyone who has argued online, defended a gut political loyalty, or retrofitted a moral stance to match their tribe recognizes the mechanism.

Context matters. As “Darwin’s bulldog,” Huxley spent his career defending evolution and a more rigorous scientific public sphere against inherited dogma. This sentence is a warning label for the modern mind: even when we think we’re doing science, we’re vulnerable to motivated reasoning; even when we think we’re being principled, we may be protecting identity. Subtext: skepticism must be aimed inward first. The enemy isn’t ignorance; it’s the human talent for making desire sound like deduction.