19th-century Philosopher Quotes

The moral and religious teachings of no bible reach a higher altitude than the intelligence and mental development of the age and country which produced it.

Nothing that you will learn in the course of your studies will be of the slightest possible use to you in after life – save only this – that if you work hard and intelligently you should be able to detect when a man is talking rot, and that, in my view, is the main, if not the sole, purpose of education.

John Alexander Smith

Nature around us is order and reason, exactly as is the human mind. Our everyday activity implies a perfect confidence in the universality of the laws of nature.

Lucien Lévy-Bruhl

We need not seek a cause or a motive or a purpose for that which is, in its nature, eternally self-existent and free.

Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan

A system is said to be coherent if every fact in the system is related every other fact in the system by relations that are not merely conjunctive. A deductive system affords a good example of a coherent system.

Philosophy takes it upon itself to throw off the fear of things earthly, to rob death of its poisonous sting.

Franz Rosenzweig

The lot of critics is to be remembered by what they failed to understand.

From the point of view of the pure morphologist the recapitulation theory is an instrument of research enabling him to reconstruct probable lines of descent; from the standpoint of the student of development and heredity the fact of recapitulation is a difficult problem whose solution would perhaps give the key to a true understanding of the real nature of heredity.

There was nothing natural about laissez-faire; free markets could never have come into being merely by allowing things to take their course. Just as cotton manufactures were created by the help of protective tariffs, export bounties, and indirect wage subsidies, laissez-faire was enforced by the state.

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

Roy Wood Sellars

There is no longer any religion when there is no longer any privileged religion. Take from religion its exclusive power and it will no longer exist.

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

Intellectualism is not taught in school.

Jules de Gaultier

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)

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

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

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

If we start with the assumption, grounded on experience, that there is uniformity in this average, and so long as this is secured to us, we can afford to be perfectly indifferent to the fate, as regards causation, of the individuals which compose the average.

Force is not an impelling God, not an essence separate from the material substratum of things. A force not united to matter, but floating freely above it, is an idle conception. Nitrogen, carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, sulphur, and phosphorus, possess their inherent qualities from eternity.

Jacob Moleschott

A great man is one who seizes the vital issue in a complex question, what we might call the jugular vein of the whole organism, and spends his energies upon that

Great truths always dwell a long time with small minorities, and the real voice of God is often that which rises above the masses, not that which follows them.

The more comprehensive a science becomes the closer it comes to philosophy, so that it may become difficult to say where the science leaves off and philosophy begins.

Samuel Alexander

Ignorance is like an eclipse. When the sun is eclipsed there is no sunlight. When the moon is eclipsed there is no moonlight. Likewise, when the mind is shrouded by ignorance, no knowledge can arise.

There is no such thing as the probability of four aces in one hand, or the probability of anything else. Given all the relevant data which there are to be known, everything is either certainly true or certainly false.

Clarence Irving Lewis

Would you reach the infinite? Then enter into finite things, working out all that they contain.

George Herbert Palmer