Germaine de Staël Quotes
New doctrines ever displease the old. They like to fancy that the world has been losing wisdom, instead of gaining it, since they were young.
Staël, Germaine de. Germany. Vol. 1, John Murray, 1813.
While this is often true, it is another Mises exaggeration using the word “every” in this quotation. Darwin’s theory of evolution was immediately accepted by most other scientists and intellectuals. The opponents then were the religious fundamentalists. The same is true today. Einstein’s Theory of Relativity was accepted by most other scientist as soon as they read it and worked out the mathematics. That was before there was any physical or experimental evidence, which did not come till 1919.
Most major new scientific findings are conceptually different from what the current generation of scientists have learned and been used to. It takes some time for reflection and the death of the most recalcitrant scientists. For the new generation of scientists there is no problem. Today, even college students have little trouble thinking in the framework of Einstein’s Relativity, while that was a huge problem for most when Einstein fist published at the beginning of the 20th century.
Anne Louise Germaine de Staël-Holstein, commonly known as Madame de Staël), was a French woman of letters and political theorist, the daughter of banker and French finance minister Jacques Necker and Suzanne Curchod, a leading salonnière. She was a voice of moderation in the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era up to the French Restoration. She was present at the Estates General of 1789 and at the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. Her intellectual collaboration with Benjamin Constant between 1794 and 1810 made them one of the most celebrated intellectual couples of their time.
