Science & Tech Quote by Thomas Carlyle

Carlyle is yanking the 19th century’s smug lab coat off by the collar. The Industrial Revolution is humming, “science and sciences” multiplying into disciplines, methods, professional guilds. Progress has a priesthood now. And Carlyle, a writer who spent his career worrying over the spiritual vacancy of modern life, refuses to let measurement become meaning. The line’s little stutter - “science and sciences” - reads like a sideways sneer at the era’s bureaucratized knowledge: not discovery, but departments.

The intent isn’t anti-science; it’s anti-reduction. Carlyle’s “after all” concedes the real achievements, then pivots to the part that can’t be filed away. “Still a miracle” is his insistence that explanation doesn’t cancel wonder. The subtext is moral and psychological: a civilization that believes it has decoded everything is a civilization primed for complacency, for treating the world as mere inventory. “Inscrutable” is the key word. He’s not saying the world is unknowable; he’s saying it remains larger than our accounts of it, and that the residue - the unmastered, the unpriced, the uncanny - is where humility and reverence begin.

The kicker is the democratic challenge embedded in the last clause: “to whosoever will think of it.” Wonder isn’t reserved for prophets or professors. It’s available to anyone willing to actually look, to think past the noise of utility. Carlyle frames enchantment as a choice, and indicts a modern mind that forgets it has one.