Science Quote by William John Wills

Wills is trying to draw a hard boundary around the Victorian faith in “reason”: use it, yes, but don’t swagger with it. The phrase “given to be used freely” flatters the reader with a sense of intellectual entitlement, then immediately tightens the leash with “but not audaciously.” That little pivot is the engine of the line. It’s a warning against a particular kind of scientific vanity: the temptation to treat cleverness as a license to force the world to match your theory.

The subtext is ethical as much as epistemological. “Rare senses and powers of reasoning” casts observation and logic as gifts - almost a sacred endowment - which makes misuse feel like betrayal, not mere error. Wills isn’t only afraid of being wrong; he’s afraid of being willful. “To discover, not to pervert the truth” frames inquiry as a moral posture. “Pervert” is pointedly harsh: it suggests twisting, corrupting, deliberately bending facts for pride, ideology, or reputation. He’s anticipating motivated reasoning before the term exists.

Context matters because Wills lived in a century when science was rapidly professionalizing and also politically combustible: exploration, geology, evolutionary debate, empire, and industrial progress all raised the stakes of what “truth” could justify. As a scientist who died young, he writes with an almost anxious humility - an insistence that the legitimacy of reason depends on restraint. The line works because it treats intellectual freedom not as a right to dominate reality, but as a discipline: courage tempered by reverence for what resists our preferred conclusions.