Ernst Mach - The science of mechanics (1893)

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Experiments are never absolutely exact, but they at least may lead the inquiring mind to conjecture that... key which will clear up the connection of all the facts.

Ernst Mach
All science has its origin in the needs of life.

Ernst Mach
Physical science makes no investigation at all into things that are absolutely inaccessible to exact investigation, or as yet inaccessible to it.

Ernst Mach
Physical science does not pretend to be a complete view of the world; it simply claims that it is working toward such a complete view in the future.

Ernst Mach
Purely mechanical phenomena do not exist... are abstractions, made, either intentionally or from necessity, for facilitating our comprehension of things. The science of mechanics does not comprise the foundations, no, nor even a part of the world, but only an aspect of it.

Ernst Mach
Science is communicated by instruction, in order that one man may profit by the experience of another and be spared the trouble of accumulating it for himself; and thus, to spare posterity, the experiences of whole generations are stored up in libraries.

Ernst Mach
That branch of physics which is at once the oldest and the simplest and which is therefore treated as introductory to other departments of this science, is concerned with the motions and equilibrium of masses. It bears the name of mechanics.

Ernst Mach
An incomplete knowledge put into words forms a relatively firm prop for fleeting thoughts, from which the thoughts, seeking among facts, set out, and to which, modifying it by criticism and comparison, they continually return.

Ernst Mach
We are entitled to regard our knowledge of the decisive conditions of any phenomenon as sufficient only in the event that such conditions determine the phenomenon precisely and uniquely.

Ernst Mach
Economy of communication and of apprehension is of the very essence of science. Herein lies its pacificatory, its enlightening, its refining element.

Ernst Mach
Everything which we observe in nature imprints itself uncomprehended and unanalyzed in our percepts and ideas which then, in their turn, mimic the processes of nature in their most general and most striking features.

Ernst Mach
It is a peculiar property of instinctive knowledge that it is predominantly of a negative nature. We cannot so well say what must happen as we can what cannot happen, since the latter alone stands in glaring contrast to the obscure mass of experience in us in which single characters are not distinguished.

Ernst Mach
The history of the development of mechanics is quite indispensable to a full comprehension of the science in its present condition. It also affords a simple and instructive example or the processes by which natural science generally is developed.

Ernst Mach
The grist and kernel of mechanical ideas has in almost every case grown up in the investigation of very simple and special cases of mechanical processes; and the analysis of the history of the discussions concerning these cases must ever remain the method at once the most effective and the most natural for laying this gist and kernel bare.

Ernst Mach
Properly speaking the world is not composed of "things" as its elements, but colors, tones, pressures, spaces, times, in short what we ordinarily call individual sensations.

Ernst Mach
We err when we expect more enlightenment form an hypothesis than from the facts themselves.

Ernst Mach
The highest philosophy of the scientific investigator is precisely this toleration of an incomplete conception of the world and the preference for it rather than an apparently perfect, but inadequate conception.

Ernst Mach
In the infinite variety of nature many ordinary events occur; while others appear uncommon, perplexing, astonishing, or even contradictory to the ordinary run of things. As long as this is the case we do not possess a well-settled and unitary conception of nature.

Ernst Mach
The knowledge of the development of a science rests on the study of writings in their historical sequence and in their historical connection.

Ernst Mach
A competent view of the world can never be got as a gift; we must acquire it by hard work.

Ernst Mach
All this, the positive and physical essence of mechanics, which makes its chief and highest interest for a student of nature, is in existing treatises completely buried and concealed beneath a mass of technical considerations.

Ernst Mach
The function of science, as we take it, is to replace experience. Thus, on the one hand, science must remain in the province of experience, but, on the other, must hasten beyond it, constantly expecting confirmation, constantly expecting the reverse. Where neither confirmation nor refutation is possible, science is not concerned.

Ernst Mach
The acquisition of the most elementary truth does not devolve upon the individual alone: it is pre-effected in the development of the race.

Ernst Mach
Science itself, therefore, may be regarded as a minimal problem, consisting of the completest possible presentment of facts with the least possible expenditure of thought.

Ernst Mach