Arthur Eddington - Mind Quotes

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The essential difference, which we meet in entering the realm of spirit and mind, seems to hang round the word "Ought."

Arthur Eddington
I think it is not irreligion but a tidiness of mind, which rebels against the idea of permeating scientific research with a religious implication.

Arthur Eddington
The laws of logic do not prescribe the way our minds think; they prescribe the way our minds ought to think.

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
The mind-stuff is not spread in space and time. But we must presume that in some other way or aspect it can be differentiated into parts. Only here and there does it arise to the level of consciousness, but from such islands proceeds all knowledge. The latter includes our knowledge of the physical world.

Arthur Eddington
It is one thing for the human mind to extract from the phenomena of nature the laws which it has itself put into them; it may be a far harder thing to extract laws over which it has no control. It is even possible that laws which have not their origin in the mind may be irrational, and we can never succeed in formulating them.

Arthur Eddington
The mind has an outlook which transcends the natural law by which it functions.

Arthur Eddington
Never mind what two tons refers to. What is it? How has it entered in so definite a way into our exprerience? Two tons is the reading of the pointer when the elephant was placed on a weighing machine. Let us pass on. … And so we see that the poetry fades out of the problem, and by the time the serious application of exact science begins we are left only with pointer readings.

Arthur Eddington
Scientific theories have blundered no doubt in the past; they blunder no doubt today; yet we cannot doubt that along with the error there come gleams of a truth for which the human mind is impelled to strive.

Arthur Eddington
That which in the physical world shadows the nonsense in the mind affords no ground for its condemnation. In a world of aether and electrons we might perhaps encounter nonsense; we could not encounter damned nonsense.

Arthur Eddington
The mind is irresistibly drawn to play with the thought that somewhere in the universe there may be other beings - a little lower than the angels" whom Man may regard as his equals - or perhaps his superiors.

Arthur Eddington
Where science has progressed the farthest, the mind has but regained from nature that which the mind has put into nature.

Arthur Eddington
However successful the theory of a four-dimensional world may be, it is difficult to ignore a voice inside us which whispers "At the back of your mind, you know that a fourth dimension is all nonsense." I fancy that that voice must often have had a busy time in the past history of physics.... Let us not be beguiled by this voice. It is discredited.

Arthur Eddington
The mind is not content to leave scientific Truth in a dry husk of mathematical symbols, and demands that it shall be alloyed with familiar images. The mathematician, who handles x so lightly, may fairly be asked to state, not indeed the inscrutable meaning of x in nature, but the meaning which x conveys to him.

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