Science Quote by Arthur Keith

Tolerance gets cast here less as a warm virtue than as a piece of social technology: a mental discipline that civilization both produces and depends on. Arthur Keith, writing as a scientist in an era obsessed with “progress,” frames tolerance as a condition of mind - something cultivated, almost trained - not a natural moral instinct. That phrasing matters. It pulls tolerance out of the churchy register of kindness and puts it into the laboratory of civic survival.

The sentence also hides a subtle feedback loop. Civilization “encourages” tolerance, but tolerance is also “necessary for” civilization. Keith is describing a self-reinforcing system: complex societies require people to live with difference, friction, and competing claims; in turn, the very routines of urban life, institutions, and law teach people (sometimes grudgingly) to restrain impulse and accept pluralism. The intent is pragmatic: tolerance isn’t optional decor; it’s infrastructure.

Context sharpens the edge. Keith’s lifetime spans high imperialism, the rise of nationalism, two world wars, and the period when scientists were routinely asked to legitimize social hierarchies. A “condition of mind” can be read as a civilizational badge - implying that intolerance signals primitiveness or cultural failure. That’s the subtextual risk: tolerance becomes a yardstick used to rank peoples, not just a standard applied within a society.

Still, the line’s power is its coolness. By refusing sentiment, Keith makes tolerance sound like the price of admission to modern life: if civilization is the experiment, tolerance is the controlling variable.