"Never run after scientific truth. Stand where you are, and in a few years scientific truth will run after you."

That is typical of all the developments of scientific thought in our day. Many prophets and righteous men, many thinkers and idealists, have wasted their lives in running after scientific truth. Never run after scientific truth. Stand where you are, and in a few years scientific truth will run after you. Continue to eat pork, and sooner or later the doctors will say that pork is the only food that is perfectly digestible. Continue to drink port, and sooner or later a Man will arise in medical circles who will prove that port is the only certain safeguard against gout. The specialist may have told you to take your children to the seaside. But if you are only long enough in packing he will very likely have discovered that sea air is poison before you start. The best authorities may have told you (if your chest is weak) to make your bed in your back garden for a year. They may be telling you to grow your tulips in your bedroom the next year. In fact, I did definitely see in a medical article the other day that the fresh-air cure ought to be given up as fresh air was not so good a thing as had been supposed. The truth of the matter is, I suppose, that what a medical theorist has to do is almost exactly the same as what a social or historical theorist has to do: he has to strike an average between an enormous number of effects produced by one thing, all of them different effects, some of them contradictory effects. It is as difficult (I expect) to say whether the effect of sherry is good or bad as to say whether the effect of Napoleon was good or bad. Among these ordinary human things there is no such thing as the simple poison and the simple antidote.

-January 19, 1907, Illustrated London News