Alfred North Whitehead - Science Quotes

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Without deductive logic science would be entirely useless. It is merely a barren game to ascend from the particular to the general, unless afterwards we can reverse the process and descend from the general to the particular, ascending and descending like angels on Jacob's ladder.

Alfred North Whitehead
Science is simply setting out on a fishing expedition to see whether it cannot find some procedure which it can call measurement of space and some procedure which it can call the measurement of time, and something which it can call a system of forces, and something which it can call masses..

Alfred North Whitehead
Science suggests a cosmology; and whatever suggests a cosmology suggests a religion.

Alfred North Whitehead
Neither logic without observation, nor observation without logic, can move one step in the formation of science.

Alfred North Whitehead
Science is a river with two sources, the practical source and the theoretical source. The practical source is the desire to direct our actions to achieve predetermined ends... The theoretical source is the desire to understand.

Alfred North Whitehead
In the first place, there can be no living science unless there is a widespread instinctive conviction in the existence of an Order of Things, and, in particular, of an Order of Nature.

Alfred North Whitehead
Science is not discussing the causes of knowledge, but the coherence of knowledge.

Alfred North Whitehead
The results of science are never quite true. By a healthy independence of thought perhaps we sometimes avoid adding other people's errors to our own.

Alfred North Whitehead
Science is in the minds of men, but men sleep and forget, and at their best in any one moment of insight entertain but scanty thoughts. Science therefore is nothing but a confident expectation that relevant thoughts will occasionally occur.

Alfred North Whitehead
For mathematics is the science of the most complete abstractions to which the human mind can attain.

Alfred North Whitehead
Science has always suffered from the vice of overstatement. In this way conclusions true within strict limitations have been generalized dogmatically into a fallacious universality.

Alfred North Whitehead
Logic is the olive branch from the old to the young, the wand which in the hands of youth has the magic property of creating science.

Alfred North Whitehead
It is natural to think that an abstract science cannot be of much importance in affairs of human life, because it has omitted from its consideration everything of real interest.

Alfred North Whitehead
Science is either an important statement of systematic theory correlating observations of a common world or is the daydream of a solitary intelligence with a taste for the daydream of publication.

Alfred North Whitehead
Inventive genius requires pleasurable mental activity as a condition for its vigorous exercise. "Necessity is the mother of invention" is a silly proverb. "Necessity is the mother of futile dodges" is much closer to the truth. The basis of growth of modern invention is science, and science is almost wholly the outgrowth of pleasurable intellectual curiosity.

Alfred North Whitehead
The originality of mathematics consists in the fact that in mathematical science connections between things are exhibited which, apart from the agency of human reason, are extremely unobvious.

Alfred North Whitehead
No man of science wants merely to know. He acquires knowledge to appease his passion for discovery. He does not discover in order to know, he knows in order to discover.

Alfred North Whitehead
No more impressive warning can be given to those who would confine knowledge and research to what is apparently useful, than the reflection that conic sections were studied for eighteen hundred years merely as an abstract science, without regard to any utility other than to satisfy the craving for knowledge.

Alfred North Whitehead
When we consider what religion is for mankind, and what science is, it is no exaggeration to say that the future course of history depends upon the decision of this generation as to the relations between them.

Alfred North Whitehead
Matter-of-fact is an abstraction, arrived at by confining thought to purely formal relations which then masquerade as the final reality. This is why science, in its perfection, relapses into the study of differential equations. The concrete world has slipped through the meshes of the scientific net.

Alfred North Whitehead
Mathematics as a science commenced when first someone, probably a Greek, proved propositions about any things or about some things, without specification of definite particular things. These propositions were first enunciated by the Greeks for geometry; and, accordingly, geometry was the great Greek mathematical science.

Alfred North Whitehead
All science as it grows toward perfection becomes mathematical in its ideas.

Alfred North Whitehead
Religion will not regain its old power until it can face change in the same spirit as does science. Its principles may be eternal, but the expression of those principles requires continual development.

Alfred North Whitehead
The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanations of complex facts. We are apt to fall into the error of thinking that the facts are simple because simplicity is the goal of our quest. The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be, "Seek simplicity and distrust it."

Alfred North Whitehead
In order that a mathematical science of any importance may be founded upon conventional definitions, the entities created by them must have properties which bear some affinity to the properties of existing things.

Alfred North Whitehead
We forget how strained and paradoxical is the view of nature which modern science imposes on our thoughts.

Alfred North Whitehead
More and more it is becoming evident that what the West can most readily give to the East is its science and its scientific outlook. This is transferable from country to country, and from race to race, wherever there is a rational society.

Alfred North Whitehead
But to come very near to a true theory, and to grasp its precise application, are two very different things, as the history of science teaches us. Everything of importance has been said before by somebody who did not discover it.

Alfred North Whitehead
Faith in the possibility of science, generated antecedently to the development of modern scientific theory, is an unconscious derivative from medieval theology.

Alfred North Whitehead
It is the business of the future to be dangerous; and it is among the merits of science that it equips the future for its duties.

Alfred North Whitehead