19th-century Philosopher Quotes

The universe as a totality is without cause, without origin, without end.

Science acts like an enchantment to disarm criticism; and mental quacks perceiving this, hasten to call their nostrums science.

The analysis of the Aristotelian theory of life must therefore be one of the corner-stones of any historical works on biology.

Hans Driesch
Hans Driesch
We have repeatedly insisted... that the boundary between truth and error is not a rigid one, and we were able ultimately to demonstrate that what we generally call truth, namely a conceptual world coinciding with the external world, is merely the most expedient error.

Hans Vaihinger
Hans Vaihinger
Science is universally verified knowledge of a real universe which includes countless individuals; and the very definition of a fool is one who conceives himself wiser than science.

Observation and experiment, without a rational hypothesis, is like a man groping at objects at random with his eyes shut.

Henry Philip Tappan
Henry Philip Tappan
No radical change on the plane of history is possible without crime.

Hermann von Keyserling
Hermann von Keyserling
All knowledge, we admit, is in the last resort "empirical," in the sense that it arises out of facts, that is, out of experiences which we cannot altogether fashion as we please to suit our own convenience, or our own sense of what is fitting or desirable, but have largely to accept as they come to us.

Scientific discovery is like poetic creation, and creates and follows its own laws before they are technically drawn up, formulated, tabulated. It anticipates, often half unconsciously, its own conclusions.

The scientist is like a child with a toy which he has taken apart. He understands now how it works, but not all the king's horses and all the king's men can put together that unsightly heap of torn flesh and dissected organs which was once a living frog or embryo chicken.

Foresight is indispensable for action. Now action for any organism of the animal kingdom is an absolute necessity. Surrounded by hostile nature it must act, it must foresee, if it wishes to live. "All life, all action," says Fouillée, "is a conscious or an unconscious divining. Divine or you will be devoured."

The best physicians must be the best observers, but the man who sees keenly, who hears clearly, and whose senses, powerful at the start, are sharpened and refined by constant exercise, will only in exceptional instances be a visionary or a dreamer.

The true mathematician and physicist know very well that the realms of the small and the great often obey quite different rules.

The history of science shows that great discoveries are made by means of imaginative insight, but it also teaches that mere imagination without dependence upon known facts is frequently a source of much mischief.

To renounce progress is as silly as to renounce the Earth's force of gravitation.

Mathematics is merely an auxiliary of science, an appendix to Physics.

The paths by which people journey toward happiness lie in part through the world about them and in part through the experience of their own soul.

The mathematician is like a man travelling through a strange country. Roads branch out in all directions. He knows the point of the compass towards which he is aiming, and selects road after road as it promises to lead him thither.

The average lifespan of a physiological truth is three or four years.

Hermann Lotze
Hermann Lotze
Every nursing mother, in the midst of her little dependent brood, has far more right to whine, sulk or scold, as temperament dictates, because beefsteak and coffee are not prepared for her and exactly to her taste, than any man ever had or ever can have during the present stage of human evolution.

Antoinette Brown Blackwell
Antoinette Brown Blackwell
The highest, the only reality, is ever at hand, but for the most part invisible. Genius makes it visible...

It is only a world embodying the principle of relativity, in the form which the doctrine entails, that can be said to exhibit the character of mind, with its exclusion of disconnected fragments and relations.

Richard Haldane, 1st Viscount Haldane
Richard Haldane, 1st Viscount Haldane
The ability to imagine relations is one of the most indispensable conditions of all precise thinking. No subject can be named in the investigation of which it is not imperatively needed; but it can be nowhere else so thoroughly acquired as in the study of mathematics.

John Fiske (philosopher)
John Fiske (philosopher)
Intellectualism is not taught in school.

No problem is more crucial for a naturalistic view of the world than the mind-body problem.