Science and Reason

The two cultures and the scientific revolution.

 

At the very smallest wheel of our reasoning it is possible for a handful of questions to^reak the bank of our answers.

Say it, no ideas but in things.

Nature is not a temple, but a workshop, and man’s the workman in it.

Where observation is concerned, chance favours only the prepared mind.

It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle—they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisivemoments.

Facts were never pleasing to him. He acquired them with reluctance and got rid of them with relief. He was never on terms with them until he had stood them on their heads.

For the rational study of the law the black-letter man may be the man of the present, but the man of the future is the man of statistics and the master of economics.

 

Analysis kills spontaneity. The grain once ground into flour springs and germinates no more.

We may not be able to get certainty, but we can get probability, and half a loaf is better than no bread.

Every body continues in its state of rest, or of uniform motion in a right line, unless it is compelled to change that state by forces impressed upon it.

The end of our foundation is the knowledge of causes, and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of human Empire, to the effecting of all things possible.

Intellectual freedom is essential to human society—freedom to obtain and distribute information, freedom for open-minded and unfearing debate, and freedom from pressure by officialdom and prejudices.

In science it often happens that scientists say,

Radioactivity is shown to be accompanied by chemical changes in which new types of matter are being continually produced. . . . The conclusion is drawn that these chemical changes must be sub-atomic in character.

He that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom. J. R.R.

 

The faculty of imagination is both the rudder and the bridle of the senses.

The fatal tendency of mankind to leave off thinking about a thing when it is no longer doubtful is the cause of half their errors.

What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe … Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?

 

Science moves, but slowly slowly, creeping on from point to point.

 

The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.

Equations are more important to me because politics is for the present but an equation is something for eternity.

 

Technology is destructive only in the hands of people who do not realize that they are one and the same process as the universe.

The divisions of Perspective are 3, as used in drawing; of these, the first includes the diminution in size of opaque objects; the second treats of the diminution and loss of outline in such opaque objects; the third, of the diminution and loss of color at long distances.