"Whatever things may have been in their origin, they are what they are, both in themselves and in regard to their indications respecting other beings or influences the existence of which may be implied in theirs"
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A Victorian historian’s impatience with metaphysical fog hangs off every clause here. Smith is drawing a hard boundary around what can be responsibly said about the world: origins are interesting, but they are not permission slips for speculation. “Whatever things may have been in their origin” concedes the era’s obsession with beginnings (Darwin, geology, comparative religion), then promptly demotes it. The pivot is blunt: “they are what they are.” Present reality, not genesis-myth, is the evidentiary ground.
The sentence is doing two jobs at once. First, it defends a positivist temperament: describe the thing as it exists “in itself,” not as you wish it to have been. Second, it grants a carefully limited kind of inference. Things don’t just sit there; they carry “indications” that point outward, suggesting “other beings or influences” whose existence may be “implied.” Smith isn’t banning big claims about hidden causes; he’s tightening the chain of custody. If you’re going to talk about God, history’s “laws,” racial destiny, or any invisible mover fashionable in late-19th-century public debate, you must earn it through what the thing demonstrably indicates.
The subtext is moral as much as methodological: stop laundering ideology through origin stories. In an imperial and nationalist age that loved to justify power by citing ancient roots and providential designs, Smith insists that legitimacy can’t be smuggled in via “how it began.” Reality has to be read from its observable character and its traceable effects, not from romanticized beginnings or convenient first causes.
The sentence is doing two jobs at once. First, it defends a positivist temperament: describe the thing as it exists “in itself,” not as you wish it to have been. Second, it grants a carefully limited kind of inference. Things don’t just sit there; they carry “indications” that point outward, suggesting “other beings or influences” whose existence may be “implied.” Smith isn’t banning big claims about hidden causes; he’s tightening the chain of custody. If you’re going to talk about God, history’s “laws,” racial destiny, or any invisible mover fashionable in late-19th-century public debate, you must earn it through what the thing demonstrably indicates.
The subtext is moral as much as methodological: stop laundering ideology through origin stories. In an imperial and nationalist age that loved to justify power by citing ancient roots and providential designs, Smith insists that legitimacy can’t be smuggled in via “how it began.” Reality has to be read from its observable character and its traceable effects, not from romanticized beginnings or convenient first causes.
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| Topic | Truth |
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