Science and Reason

The atoms of Democritus

Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est.

Printing, gunpowder, and the mariner’s needle [compass] … these three have changed the whole face and state of things throughout the world.

Books must follow sciences, and not sciences books.

The subtlety of nature is greater many times over than the subtlety of the senses and understanding.

Nature cannot be ordered about, except by obeying her.

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.

God forbid that we should give out a dream of our own imagination for a pattern of the world.

A little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion.

When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes.

The main effort, for now many years, has been a critical effort; the endeavours, in all branches of knowledge—theology, philosophy, history, art, science—to see the object as in itself it really is.

The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light … He who works for sweetness and light united, works to make reason and the will of God prevail.

I reject any religious doctrine that does not appeal to reason and is in conflict with morality.

Human reason is beautiful and invincible. No bars, no barbed wire, no pulping of books, No sentence of banishment can prevail against it.

Thou shalt not sit With statisticians nor commit A social science.

Say it, no ideas but in things.

“What’s the good of Mercator’s North Poles and Equators, Tropics, Zones and Meridian Lines?” So the Bellman would cry: and the crew would reply, “They are merely conventional signs!”

When I heard the learn’d astronomer, When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me, When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them, When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room, How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick, Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself, In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time, Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood, The Elfin from the green grass, and from me The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?

Love not the flower they pluck, and know it not, And all their botany is Latin names.

Philosophy will clip an angel’s wings.

Do not all charms fly At the mere touch of cold philosophy?

When Bishop Berkeley said “there was no matter,” And proved it—’twas no matter what he said.

The starry Galileo, with his woes.