Science Quote by William Robertson Smith

The line hides its blade in scholarly courtesy. "It may be said" and "no more than a hypothesis" sound like modest throat-clearing, but they function as rhetorical armor: Robertson Smith is preparing to say something that will upset people who mistake inherited ritual for timeless truth. The real target isn’t religion as such; it’s the complacency of assuming that a practice persists because it still means what believers think it means.

His key phrase, "force of precedent", reframes religion as social technology. Forms survive not because every generation consciously re-endorses their theology, but because repetition itself becomes evidence. Once a rite is woven into calendars, kinship obligations, and communal identity, it can outlast the story that originally justified it. Smith is describing a kind of cultural inertia: tradition becomes self-perpetuating, and the community’s need for continuity quietly replaces the rite’s original rationale.

The subtext is Victorian and combustible. As a scientist-anthropologist working in an era obsessed with origins (of species, of societies, of scripture), Smith is arguing that religious history should be studied like any other human institution: through development, drift, and adaptation, not only through doctrine. That’s why the sentence leans on procedural humility while smuggling in a destabilizing implication: if forms can remain when meanings are lost, then meaning is not guaranteed by endurance. Longevity becomes an object of analysis, not a proof of sanctity.