Part 1 (2/2)

No delusion is greater than the notion that method and industry can make up for lack of mother-wit, either in science or in practical life.

VI

Nothing great in science has ever been done by men, whatever their powers, in whom the divine afflatus of the truth-seeker was wanting.

VII

In science, as in art, and, as I believe, in every other sphere of human activity, there may be wisdom in a mult.i.tude of counsellors, but it is only in one or two of them.

VIII

Nothing can be more incorrect than the a.s.sumption one sometimes meets with, that physics has one method, chemistry another, and biology a third.

IX

Anyone who is practically acquainted with scientific work is aware that those who refuse to go beyond fact, rarely get as far as fact; and anyone who has studied the history of science knows that almost every great step therein has been made by the ”antic.i.p.ation of Nature.”

X

There are three great products of our time.... One of these is that doctrine concerning the const.i.tution of matter which, for want of a better name, I will call ”molecular”; the second is the doctrine of the conservation of energy; the third is the doctrine of evolution.

XI

M. Comte's philosophy, in practice, might be compendiously described as Catholicism _minus_ Christianity.

XII

Fact I know; and Law I know; but what is this Necessity, save an empty shadow of my own mind's throwing?

XIII

We live in a world which is full of misery and ignorance, and the plain duty of each and all of us is to try to make the little corner he can influence somewhat less miserable and somewhat less ignorant than it was before he entered it.

XIV

The man of science, who, forgetting the limits of philosophical inquiry, slides from these formulae and symbols into what is commonly understood by materialism, seems to me to place himself on a level with the mathematician, who should mistake the x's and y's with which he works his problems for real ent.i.ties--and with this further disadvantage, as compared with the mathematician, that the blunders of the latter are of no practical consequence, while the errors of systematic materialism may paralyse the energies and destroy the beauty of a life.

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