Arthur Eddington - Experience Quotes

11 Sourced Quotes

View all Arthur Eddington Quotes
Our system of philosophy is itself on trial; it must stand or fall according as it is broad enough to find room for this experience as an element of life.

Arthur Eddington
If the kind of controversy which so often springs up between modernism and traditionalism in religion were applied to more commonplace affairs of life we might see some strange results.... It arises, let us say, from a passage in an obituary notice which mentions that the deceased had loved to watch the sunsets from his peaceful country home..... it is forgotten that what the deceased man looked out for each evening was an experience and not a creed.

Arthur Eddington
It is difficult for the matter-of-fact physicist to accept the view that the substratum of everything is of mental character. But no one can deny that mind is the first and most direct thing in our experience, and all else is remote inference — inference either intuitive or deliberate.

Arthur Eddington
If our so-called facts are changing shadows, they are shadows cast by the light of constant truth. So too in religion we are repelled by that confident theological doctrine... but we need not turn aside from the measure of light that comes into our experience showing us a Way through the unseen world.

Arthur Eddington
The problem of experiences is not limited to the interpretation of sense-impressions.

Arthur Eddington
We should not argue with the blind man who maintained that sight was an illusion to which some abnormal people were subject. Therefore in speaking of religious experience I do not attempt to prove the existence of religious experience...

Arthur Eddington
The cleavage between the scientific and the extra-scientific domain of experience is, I believe, not a cleavage between the concrete and the transcendental, but between the metrical and non-metrical.

Arthur Eddington
In any attempt to bridge the domains of experience belonging to the spiritual and physical sides of nature, time occupies the key position.

Arthur Eddington
It is by looking into our own nature that we first discover the failure of the physical universe to be co-extensive with our experience of reality. The "something to which truth matters" must surely have a place in reality what ever definition of reality we may adopt.

Arthur Eddington
Science aims at constructing a world which shall be symbolic of the world of commonplace experience.

Arthur Eddington
If we are to discern controlling laws of Nature not dictated by the mind it would seem necessary to escape as far as possible from the cut-and-dried framework into which the mind is so ready to force everything that it experiences.

Arthur Eddington