Science Quote by Arthur Keith

A scientist admitting defeat is always a little thrilling. Keith’s line refuses the comforting Enlightenment myth that reason is history’s steering wheel and desire a primitive hitchhiker. He’s arguing the opposite: rationality may explain, justify, and optimize, but it doesn’t reliably govern. The verb choice matters. “Tamed” isn’t “understood” or “managed”; it evokes domestication, training, a civilizing project. Keith is puncturing the Victorian confidence that education, progress, and respectable institutions would gradually housebreak the human animal.

The subtext is less pessimism than diagnostic clarity. Desire isn’t a bug in the system that can be patched by better arguments; it’s a primary force that recruits reason as its publicist. In modern terms, Keith anticipates what behavioral science and evolutionary psychology made explicit later: cognition is often post-hoc narration, not command-and-control. People don’t “think” their way out of wanting; they think their way into permission.

Contextually, Keith lived through an era that should have made any faith in rational progress wobble: industrial-scale war, mass propaganda, the rise of new media, and the bureaucratization of violence. “As strong as ever” lands like an empirical observation after a grim experiment run on Europe. It also reads as a warning to reformers and technocrats: policies built on the assumption that humans will comply once they’re properly informed will keep failing in the same predictable way.

The line’s quiet power is its refusal to moralize. Desire isn’t condemned; it’s simply undefeated. Reason doesn’t vanish, but it loses its fantasy of mastery.