Cassius Jackson Keyser Quotes

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For scientific theories are, each and all of them, and they will continue to be, built upon and about notions which, however sublimated, are nevertheless derived from common sense.

Cassius Jackson Keyser
The difference between a sequence that stops somewhere and one that has no end is awful. No one, unless spiritually unborn or dead, can contemplate that gulf without emotions that take hold of the infinite and everlasting.

Cassius Jackson Keyser
Nothing is quite so practical, in the sense of being effectual and influential, as the views men hold, consciously or unconsciously, regarding the great locus of their lives and their cosmic home.

Cassius Jackson Keyser
What is mathematics? I inquire, not about the word, but about the thing. Many have been the answers of former years, but none has approved itself as final. All of them, by nature belonging to the "literature of knowledge," have fallen under its law and "perished by supersession."

Cassius Jackson Keyser
The great mathematician, like the great poet or great naturalist or great administrator, is born.

Cassius Jackson Keyser
The connections shown by these particular examples hold in general: given a transformation, you have a function and a relation; given a function, you have a relation and a transformation; given a relation, you have a transformation and a function: one thing — three aspects; and the fact is exceedingly interesting and weighty.

Cassius Jackson Keyser
Creation of hyperspaces is one of the ways by which the rational spirit secures release from limitation. In them it lives ever joyously, sustained by an unfailing sense of infinite freedom.

Cassius Jackson Keyser
Mathematics is no more the art of reckoning and computation than architecture is the art of making bricks or hewing wood, no more than painting is the art of mixing colors on a palette, no more than the science of geology is the art of breaking rocks, or the science of anatomy the art of butchering.

Cassius Jackson Keyser
The Elements of Euclid is as small a part of mathematics as the Iliad is of literature; or as the sculpture of Phidias is of the world's total art.

Cassius Jackson Keyser
Who is so unfortunate as not to know something of the religious awe, the solace and the peace that come from cloistral contemplation of the purity and everlastingness of mathematical truth?

Cassius Jackson Keyser
Science does not seek emancipation in order to become a drudge, she consents to serve indeed but her service aims at freedom as an end.

Cassius Jackson Keyser
The golden age of mathematics - that was not the age of Euclid, it is ours.

Cassius Jackson Keyser
The domain of mathematics is the sole domain of certainty.

Cassius Jackson Keyser
It can, you see, be said, with the same approximation to truth, that the whole of science, including mathematics, consists in the study of transformations or in the study of relations.

Cassius Jackson Keyser
Next to the peaceful pleasure of meeting genuine curiosity, half-way, upon its own ground, comes the joy of combat when an attack upon some valued right or precious interest of the human spirit requires to be repelled.

Cassius Jackson Keyser
It is customary to speak of mathematics, of pure mathematics, and of applied mathematics, as if the first were a genus owning the other two as species. The custom is unfortunate because it is misleading.

Cassius Jackson Keyser
Their [mathematics and science] combined scope is the two-fold world of the Actual and the logically Possible.

Cassius Jackson Keyser
To assume that nature is thinkable, an incarnate rational logos, and to seek the thought supposed incarnate there - these are at once the principle and the hope of the nature student.

Cassius Jackson Keyser
Day is just as mysterious as night, and the mystery of knowledge and understanding is more wonderful and awesome than the darkness of the unknown.

Cassius Jackson Keyser
The ideal of thought is rigor; mathematics is the name that usage employs to designate, not attainment of the ideal, for it cannot be attained, but its devoted pursuit and close approximation.

Cassius Jackson Keyser
If he contend, as sometimes he will contend, that he has defined all his terms and proved all his propositions, then either he is a performer of logical miracles or he is an ass; and, as you know, logical miracles are impossible.

Cassius Jackson Keyser
Depend upon it, the universe will never really be understood unless it may be sometime resolved into an ordered multiplicity and made to own itself an everlasting drama of the calculus.

Cassius Jackson Keyser
To be indefinable is not to be unknowable and not to be unknown.

Cassius Jackson Keyser
Symbolic Logic is Mathematics, Mathematics is Symbolic Logic, the twain are one.

Cassius Jackson Keyser