“Things man was not meant to know”?

13 Comments

Peter told me at one point about watching science fiction movies when he was a kid; he said they all tended to end with the scientist character taking off his horn-rimmed glasses, facing the camera, and intoning: "There are some things man is not meant to know."

This appears to be a deeply rooted image; Rick Kleffel gave a very similar description at the beginning of a 2002 installment of his Agony Column, for example. And related lines in the IMDB pop up in places as diverse as The Andy Griffith Show ("there are some things beyond the ken of mortal man that shouldn't be tampered with") and the 1995 video game The Dig ("There are some things Man was not meant to understand"). Not to mention an article about H. P. Lovecraft that we ran in 2001.

But I'm not seeing any specific source for the line. Was it really a common one in old SF movies, or is there some particular canonical place that used it?

13 Responses to ““Things man was not meant to know”?”

  1. Anonymous

    It goes back much farther than arguments about science, into ancient arguments about trying to understand the mind of God, trying to make sense of the world, and the importance of faith as a response to not having all the answers.

    “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophies” is sometimes misquoted as “There are things in heaven and earth, Horatio, that man was not meant to know”, but perhaps Chris would know if there’s actually an early version of Hamlet which has that text.

  2. Anonymous

    Adam’s apple.

    ; )

  3. KellyB

    While its cultural origins do reach far back, the scientist reaffirming the unknowable world is an almost necessary component of B sci-fi movies.

  4. David Moles

    I’m quite sure this isn’t the original, but it constitutes the complete text of either Larry Niven’s “Unfinished Story #1” or his “Unfinished Story #2” — I can’t remember which. (The other one is a shaggy-dog story about thermodynamics.)

  5. David Moles

    That Hamlet misquote strikes me as one that’s only possible out of context.

  6. David Moles

    Oh, and while it’s not really the same thing — almost the opposite, really — I can’t resist dragging in my favorite St. Augustine quote: “Not all wonders are natural; many are devised by man’s ingenuity, many by the craft of demons.”

  7. Jed

    Yeah, I let my entry drift a little from my main focus (gasp! that never happens!); I’m specifically curious about where the line (and the image of the scientist saying it) comes from, less so about the source of the idea (since, as y’all noted, it’s a very old idea).

    I’m mighty dubious about that line having originally occurred in some version of Hamlet, for a variety of reasons.

    KellyB: so did that sort of scene really happen in a bunch of different sci-fi B-movies? Was it always the same line, or were there variations? Any idea where this apparently best-known version of the line originated?

    David: The Niven story was either 1970 or 1971, according to ISFDB—so, yeah, not the original source, but still interesting. And cool Augustine quote. That would seem to suggest that there are only three categories of wonders: natural ones (made by God?), those created by humans, and those created by demons. Is that what he meant to indicate?

  8. Ted

    The best I can find with Google Print is this passage from No Cure for the Future by Gary Westfahl and George Slusser:

    “Reactive science is acceptable; thus Zarkov can build Flash an invisibility ray to save Dale, Flash, and ultimately the entire Earth from Ming, Emperor of Mongo. But active science is disallowed because it is arrogant, Faustian, and unnatural. Thus, Wells’ scientist who invents the invisibility potion in The Invisible Man cannot be treated as a hero in the movie. In other words science applied for the good of humanity is fine and heroic; pure research only for the sake of knowledge itself is self-indulgent and ultimately evil. As is said in umpteen B movies, ‘There are some things Man is not meant to know!'”

    If academics feel they can get away with “umpteen,” I figure it’s going to be hard to find a canonical source for the line.

  9. Jon

    Hmm. Lowgrade research reveals a couple of interesting possibilities. One of my library’s Dictionary of Quotations (Evans, 1968) has one: “There are many things of which a wise man might wish to be ignorant.” (Emerson: Demonology).

    According to an article from the Guardian (19 Dec 03), the movie The Conquest of Space has the line, “There are some things that man is not meant to do,” which is closer but not quite.

  10. Fred

    My guess is that it goes back to various versions of Frankenstein. I recall Mary Shelley’s revised text having a similar quote in it somewhere, and I’ll betcha it’s in either the film version of Frankenstein or Bride of Frankenstein.

  11. Jed

    Aha! You may be right, Fred; thanks! Here’s a line from The Bride of Frankenstein (1935):

    Elizabeth: Henry, don’t say those things. Don’t think them! It’s blasphemous and wicked. We are not meant to know those things.

    So it’s not quite the iconic line and image, but it seems quite likely to be a precursor, and possibly the source.

  12. John Scalzi

    I believe there’s some version of the line in the 1931 Frankenstein, and also in the 1936 film “The Invisible Ray” as well.

  13. irilyth

    This surely isn’t the source, but it might be a clue (or it might not be :^): There’s a card in Illuminati, the Steve Jackson board game, called Secrets Man Was Not Meant To Know.

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