In his editorial of NR Spring 2021, The Editor wrote “What is legitimate can only be arrived at by testing, not decree.” Members will have noticed a spooky echo of Thomas Huxley’s words in the famous Oxford evolution debate of 1860: “On questions of physical science ‘authority’ has always been bowled out by investigation.” Whether you agree would depend upon how the ‘decree’ was arrived at and whether you are like Francis Bacon, John Locke and David Hume an empiricist or, along with René Descartes, Baruch Spinoza and, to a lesser degree, Socrates himself (a lovely little thinker), a rationalis…
