Science Quote by Liberty Hyde Bailey

Bailey draws a clean, almost surgical line between explanation and meaning, and it matters that he does it as a working scientist rather than a pulpit philosopher. By granting science the “world of How,” he’s defending the legitimacy of empirical method at a moment when modern science was rapidly professionalizing and expanding its authority. But he refuses the imperial temptation to let that authority swallow everything else. The sentence is a boundary marker: science can earn its victories without claiming the whole map.

The craft is in the phrasing. “May eventually explain” carries both confidence and humility; it imagines progress without pretending to omniscience. Then “ultimate world of Why” shifts the discussion from proximate causes to purpose and value, the questions that can’t be settled by an experiment because they’re not just about mechanisms but about what counts as a satisfying answer. Bailey isn’t merely being ecumenical toward religion and philosophy; he’s acknowledging that people live inside narratives, ethics, and awe, not just datasets.

Subtextually, he’s pushing back against two pressures common to his era: the fear that science dissolves meaning, and the counter-urge of some scientists to turn method into metaphysics. As an agriculturalist and naturalist, Bailey knew how easily a living world becomes mere resource when described only in functional terms. His “contemplation” is an insistence that wonder, moral responsibility, and spiritual interpretation aren’t childish leftovers; they’re parallel tools for navigating existence.

It’s a truce offer, but not a surrender: science gets rigor; humanity gets room.