19th-century Philosopher Quotes

That which we call the laws of nature is the sum total of the methods we have discovered for adapting things to the mind, and subjecting them to be moulded by the will.

Science can only deal with what is, and can say nothing about what ought to be, which is the concern of ethics; science can tell us about means to ends, but not about what the ends should be.

By a Gestalt quality we understand a positive content of presentation bound up in consciousness with the presence of complexes of mutually separable (i.e., independently presentable) elements. That complex of presentations which is necessary for the existence of a given Gestalt quality we call the foundation [Grundlage] of that quality.

Sometimes duplicity and treason are markers of the enemy, and sometimes, the failed intention of a masterful ally. But, nevertheless, as they burden you with a vexing brand of love, they become nothing more than the kiss of Judas, pressing a crown of thorns into your flesh.

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 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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

Hermann von Keyserling
Hermann von Keyserling
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
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.

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

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

Beauty is incapable of any explanatory science. The decisions in which we recognize it, the criticisms of Taste, are not to be built upon inductive reasonings.

Matthias Jakob Schleiden
Matthias Jakob Schleiden
Give humanity hope and it will dare and suffer joyfully, not counting the cost - hope with laughter on her banner and on her face the fresh beauty of morning.

Whatever fate may be in store for philosophy, her history can hardly fail to present a twofold interest ; for philosophical ideas are symptoms of the direction in which the spiritual development of the age is tending, and they are attempts to solve the great problems which have their root in the theoretical and practical relations in which man stands to the Universe of which he is a part.

Harald Høffding
Harald Høffding