Daily Inspiration Quote by John Ambrose Fleming

A Victorian engineer’s impatience is hiding in plain sight here: Fleming isn’t really taking a swing at Darwin so much as policing the borders of what “evolution” is allowed to mean. By insisting the theory is “totally inadequate” for the “inorganic world,” he’s pushing back against a popular intellectual drift of his era: treating evolution less as a biological mechanism and more as a master key for everything from geology to ethics to cosmic history. The absolute phrasing (“totally”) is strategic. It’s not a nuanced methodological note; it’s a hard stop.

The intent is disciplinary as much as philosophical. Fleming, an inventor steeped in circuits, materials, and measurable causes, is defending a picture of nature where rocks, metals, and physical laws don’t “develop” by the same logic as organisms. That’s the surface claim. The subtext is a warning against category error: when people use a successful scientific theory as a cultural metaphor, it starts doing ideological work it can’t justify. Evolution becomes a worldview, and worldview starts masquerading as science.

Context matters: late-19th and early-20th century Britain was a pressure cooker of scientific prestige, religious anxiety, and newly industrial authority. As technologies remade daily life, engineers like Fleming occupied a strange role - modernity’s builders who often resisted modernity’s metaphysical swagger. The line reads as a bid for epistemic humility: biology can explain life’s diversification; it can’t be drafted to explain why there is matter, order, or law in the first place.