Time & Perspective Quote by Frederick Soddy

Soddy is doing something sly here: he dresses a radical social hope in the sober suit of scientific inevitability. The sentence barrels forward on its own momentum, a long Victorian exhale that turns “appears as though” into a wager and “may well” into a quiet insistence. Whatever “it” is - war, want, ignorance, even the old Malthusian logic of scarcity - he frames it as a technical problem already half-solved, steadily “mitigated” by the one force he trusts: the compounding ascent of knowledge.

The intent is missionary, but not religious. Soddy is selling progress as the new providence, where human betterment is not a moral conversion but an engineering outcome. The subtext is more complicated: the same phrase that sounds liberating (“physical power and dominion over Nature”) also reveals the era’s blind spot. Dominion is not stewardship. It’s control, extraction, the confidence that Nature is a system to be mastered rather than a partner with limits. Coming from a scientist who lived through the industrial acceleration of the early 20th century - and the dawn of nuclear possibility - that confidence reads as both visionary and unnerving.

Context matters: Soddy wrote in a world where science had begun to outperform politics at shaping everyday life, yet the “physical power” he praises was also being weaponized at unprecedented scale. The line functions as a progress narrative with a hairline crack in it: it assumes knowledge naturally trends toward emancipation, when history keeps proving it also perfects domination - of nature, and of each other.