Arthur Eddington

Our environment may and should mean something towards us which is not to be measured with the tools of the physicist or described by the metrical symbols of the mathematician.

Our system of philosophy is itself on trial; it must stand or fall according as it is broad enough to find room for this experience as an element of life.

Consciousness is not wholly, nor even primarily a device for receiving sense-impressions. … there is another outlook than the scientific one, because in practice a more transcendental outlook is almost universally admitted. … who does not …

The scientific answer is relevant so far as concerns the sense-impressions … For the rest the human spirit must turn to the unseen world to which it itself belongs.

Study of the scientific world cannot prescribe the orientation of something which is excluded from the scientific world.

The desire for truth so prominent in the quest of science, a reaching out of the spirit from its isolation to something beyond, a response to beauty in nature and art, an Inner Light of conviction and guidance — are these as much a part of …

As truly as the mystic, the scientist is following a light; and it is not a false or an inferior light.

The problem of experiences is not limited to the interpretation of sense-impressions.

Our story of evolution ended with a stirring in the brain-organ of the latest of Nature's experiments; but that stirring of consciousness transmutes the whole story and gives meaning to its symbolism. Symbolically it is the end, but …

It is to this background that our own personality and consciousness belong, and those spiritual aspects of our nature not to be described by any symbolism … to which mathematical physics has hitherto restricted itself.

Mind is the first and most direct thing in our experience; all else is remote inference.

Physics most strongly insists that its methods do not penetrate behind the symbolism.

The chairs and tables around us which broadcast to us incessantly those signals which affect our sight and touch cannot in their nature be like unto the signals or to the sensations which the signals awake at the end of their journey.

It is an astonishing feat of deciphering that we should have been able to infer an orderly scheme of natural knowledge from such indirect communication.

Matter and all else that is in the physical world have been reduced to a shadowy symbolism.

We have travelled far from the standpoint which identifies the real with the concrete. Even the older philosophy found it necessary to admit exceptions; for example, time must be admitted to be real, although no one could attribute to it a …

We are no longer tempted to condemn the spiritual aspects of our nature as illusory because of their lack of concreteness.

To understand the phenomena of the physical world it is necessary to know the equations which the symbols obey but not the nature of that which is being symbolised. … this newer outlook has modified the challenge from the material to the …

Wind, earthquake, fire — meteorology, seismology, physics — pass in review, as we have been reviewing the natural forces of evolution; the Lord was not in them. Afterwards, a stirring, an awakening in the organ of the brain, a voice which …

I think it is not irreligion but a tidiness of mind, which rebels against the idea of permeating scientific research with a religious implication.

Proof is the idol before whom the pure mathematician tortures himself.

It is difficult for the matter-of-fact physicist to accept the view that the substratum of everything is of mental character. But no one can deny that mind is the first and most direct thing in our experience, and all else is remote …

Consciousness is not sharply defined, but fades into sub-consciousness; and beyond that we must postulate something indefinite but yet continuous with our mental nature. This I take it be the world-stuff.

The mind-stuff is not spread in space and time. But we must presume that in some other way or aspect it can be differentiated into parts. Only here and there does it arise to the level of consciousness, but from such islands proceeds all …