Daily Inspiration Quote by Charles Henry Parkhurst

A clergyman watching modernity gather speed, Parkhurst delivers a line that sounds like a lament but functions as a warning label. “Science has not solved problems” is the bait; “only shifted the points of problems” is the hook. He’s not denying discovery. He’s disputing the triumphalist story that discovery equals deliverance.

The phrasing matters. “Shifted the points” is almost geometric, as if social pain can be plotted on a graph: you don’t erase the line, you move the pressure. It’s a clerical critique aimed at the faith-like confidence science was starting to command in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when public health, industry, and electrification promised a kind of secular salvation. Parkhurst’s subtext: the human condition is not an engineering puzzle. Solve one constraint and you create new ones - bigger cities bring sanitation and also crowding; mechanization brings productivity and also alienation; medicine extends life and forces new ethical reckonings.

There’s also a moral argument hiding in the grammar. “Problems” aren’t just technical glitches; they’re entanglements of desire, power, and responsibility. Science can change the tools, the scale, and the timing, but it can’t tell you what a good life is, or who should pay the costs of progress. Parkhurst, famous for taking on urban corruption, likely had a civic target in mind: scientific and industrial progress can become an alibi, letting institutions claim inevitability while displacing harm onto someone else. The line works because it punctures certainty without rejecting modernity, insisting that every “solution” quietly negotiates a new moral bill.