It Is Right That We Should

This remark, from Faraday's Experimental Researches in Chemistry and Physics, reflects his conviction that clinging to a position beyond the evidence is not strength of character but intellectual failure. Faraday was deeply religious — a lifelong member of the Sandemanian Christian sect — yet he kept his religious commitments entirely separate from his experimental work and was willing to abandon cherished hypotheses when experiment contradicted them. The same principle informed his view that science advances not by champions defending theories but by individuals willing to be corrected by nature.