Science & Reason Quotes — page 36

It is an acknowledged truth in philosophy that a just theory will always be confirmed by experiment.

The lower your senses are kept, the better you may govern them. Appetite and reason are commonly like two buckets, — when one is at the top, the other is at the bottom. Now of the two, I had rather the reason-bucket be uppermost.

The Infinite, from which comes the impulse that lead us to activity, is not the highest Reason, but higher than reason; not the highest Goodness, but higher than goodness.

In vain would science scan and trace Firmly her aspect. All the while, There gleams upon her far-off face A vague unfathomable smile.

The current opinion that science and poetry are opposed is a delusion.

Constitutions should consist only of general provisions; the reason is that they must necessarily be permanent, and that they cannot calculate for the possible change of things.

A strange persuasion came upon me that, save for the grossness of the line, the grotesqueness of the forms, I had here before me the whole balance of human life in miniature, the whole interplay of instinct, reason, and fate in its …

Critics generally come to be critics by reason not of their fitness for this but of their unfitness for anything else. Books should be tried by a judge and jury as though they were crimes, and counsel should be heard on both sides.

Reason is always a kind of brute force; those who appeal to the head rather than the heart, however pallid and polite, are necessarily men of violence. We speak of 'touching' a man's heart, but we can do nothing to his head but hit it.

Unmoved though Witlings sneer and Rivals rail, Studious to please, yet not ashamed to fail. He scorns the meek address, the suppliant strain. With merit needless, and without it vain. In Reason, Nature, Truth, he dares to trust: Ye Fops, …

The single statement, the brief formula, the few words of which replace in our minds a wide range of relationships between isolated phenomena, is what we term a scientific law.

Physical science comes nearest to that complete system of exact knowledge which all sciences have before them as an ideal. Some fall far short of it.

How can this cosmic religious experience be communicated from man to man, if it cannot lead to a definite conception of God or to a theology? It seems to me that the most important function of art and of science is to arouse and keep alive …

The great tragedy of Science — the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.

[F]ertilisation of the soul is the reason for the necessity of art.

One of the first and most difficult steps in a science is to conceive clearly the nature of the magnitudes about which we are arguing.

But such is the nature of the human mind, that it always lays hold on every mind that approaches it; and as it is wonderfully fortified by an unanimity of sentiments, so is it shocked and disturbed by any contrariety. Hence the eagerness, …

Science, down to the present day, remains permeated with Malthus's teachings. Political economy continues to base its reasoning upon a tacit admission of the impossibility of rapidly increasing the productive powers of a nation

In this branch of study exactness is an essential feature; and mathematical difficulties must not be shrunk from when the nature of the subject leads to them.

The Logic of Induction is the 'Criterion of Truth' inferred from Facts, as the Logic of Deduction is the 'Criterion of Truth' deduced from necessary Principle. In Art, Truth is a means to an end; in Science, it is the only end.

We are indebted for all our miseries to our distrust of that guide, which Providence thought sufficient for our condition, our own natural reason, which rejecting both in human and Divine things, we have given our necks to the yoke of …

Transform reason into ordered intuition; let all thyself be light. This is thy goal.

The imagination is always restless and suggests a variety of thoughts, and the will, reason being laid aside, is ready for every extravagant project

Law is par excellence the thing that wants a reason.