Davy Sees Freedom in Human Fallability

The experience of ‘paralytic strokes’ (like his father’s), which destroyed ‘perception and Memory’ as well as physical motion, proved that the physical brain was the single centre of ‘all the Mental faculties’. Children were not magically endowed with intelligence and souls at birth. On the contrary: ‘A Child is not superior in Intellectual power to a common earthworm. It can scarcely move at will. It has not even that active instinctive capacity for Self-Preservation.’ Such speculations gave Davy a sense of growing excitement and freedom. He wrote two supreme declarations of faith on page 61 of his working notebook. The first was: ‘Man is capable of an infinite degree of Happiness.’ The second was: ‘The perfectibility of science is absolutely indefinite.’

Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder (2010-03-02)

• happiness
• improvability
• science