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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2014
IN TRYING TO ACHIEVE THE SIMPLICITY OF, IN SOME SENSE, scientific statements one must either, in the counsels of the wise, be very laboured or very brief. I want to be very brief and to use an essay as an essay, an attempt to try something out or on before a learned audience, or a timely speculation (that is, in time to be stopped) about whether a possible future voyage is worth undertaking, not an account of actual discovery.
1 And if this sounds like a piece of Enlightenment or Victorian rationalism, it is: I think they were right on this point ‐ though the converse does not necessarily hold, that religion is dependent on autocracy. Now the only possible proof of this generalization, like all the generalizations I am recounting, is not any listing of authorities however vast, sbut whether it is possible to think of a contrary instance. (So this one footnote can serve for all.)
