Karl Pearson

"The great danger... not content with our real knowledge of the relation of the finite to the infinite, they slur over our vast ignorance by the help of the imagination. Myth supplies the place of true knowledge where we are ignorant of the connection between finite and infinite. Hence... most concrete systems of religion present us with a certain amount of knowledge but a great deal of myth."

"Heredity. Given any organ in a parent and the same or any other organ in its offspring, the mathematical measure of heredity is the correlation of these organs for pairs of parent and offspring... The word organ here must be taken to include any characteristic which can be quantitatively measured."

"The "Eternal Why" begins to haunt his mind; "Why... am I here?" he asks. What relation do I, a part, bear to the whole—the sum of all things material and spiritual? What connection has the finite with the infinite? the temporal with the eternal?"

"[O]ur [small] knowledge of the relation of finite to infinite... is... continually increasing—science and philosophy are continally presenting... broader views of the relation of man to nature and of individual thought to abstract thought."

"Primitive man... rushes to the satisfactory conclusion that that power must be itself infinite; that he, man, is not altogether finite, and so he constructs a doctrine of the soul and its immortality. Then he builds up myths, superstitions, primitive religions, dogmas, whereby the infinite is made subject to the finite—floating on this huge bladder of mans supposed immortality. The universe is given a purpose, and that purpose is man—the whole is made subordinate to the part. That is the first solution of the problem, the keystone of most concrete religions."

"The holding of a myth explanation of any problem whereon mankind has attained true knowledge is what I term enslaved thought or dogmatism."

"For the present the Grammar may yet be of service. After an eight years life and... 4000 copies, it reappears in a revised and enlarged form."

"It follows... that... in every concrete religion the knowledge element ought to increase and the myth element decrease or... every concrete religion ought to be in a state of development."

"An imaginary explanation... too often impedes the true explanation when man has attained it. This gives rise to the so-called contests of religion and science or of religion and philosophy—the unintelligible conflicts of "faith" and "reason" which can only arise in the minds of those, who cannot perceive clearly the distinction between myth and knowledge."

"That it does not pay to gamble has been the oft repeated theme of the moralist, and has been demonstrated with much brave show of symbols by mathematicians from Lagrange to De Morgan and onwards."

"[T]he records of the tables are published in... Le Monaco and issued weekly in Paris... eight weeks roulette gave a grand total of 33,000 events. ...M. Blanc deserved a niche in the temple of science and Le Monaco a shelf in every mathematicians library."

"[M]y axiom runs as follows: "The whole is not identical with a part." This axiom leads us at once to a problem. What relation has the part to the whole?"