Science Quote by Frederick Soddy

Progress has a funny way of keeping its old myths intact. Soddy, a Nobel-winning chemist turned economic heretic, is pointing at a modern contradiction: we can split atoms and industrialize the planet, yet we still treat scarcity and competition as if they were laws of physics rather than choices of social design.

The line’s power comes from its careful friction. “Mastery over the powers of Nature” evokes the swagger of scientific modernity - the sense that human ingenuity has escaped the limits that once made hunger, cold, and toil feel inevitable. Then Soddy pivots to “adhered to the view,” a phrase that makes Darwinian struggle sound less like reality and more like doctrine. He’s not denying that life involves effort; he’s indicting the way industrial societies smuggle moral permission into a supposedly neutral description of nature. If struggle is “permanent and necessary,” inequality becomes tragic but justified, and economic arrangements can pose as fate.

Context matters: Soddy lived through the age when energy and industrial capacity exploded, alongside the catastrophes of two world wars and the brutalities of early 20th-century capitalism. He became obsessed with the mismatch between real, physical wealth (energy, resources) and financial wealth (debt, speculation). Read that way, the quote is a warning about intellectual laziness with consequences: we treat economic competition as natural law even when technology has made a different baseline possible.

Soddy’s subtext is radical for a scientist: the constraint isn’t nature anymore; it’s ideology. The “struggle” persists not because we can’t overcome it, but because powerful systems need it to feel inevitable.