Herbert Spencer - Knowledge Quotes

11 Sourced Quotes

View all Herbert Spencer Quotes
If there be an order in which the human race has mastered its various kinds of knowledge, there will arise in every child an aptitude to acquire these kinds of knowledge in the same order. So that even were the order intrinsically indifferent, it would facilitate education to lead the individual mind through the steps traversed by the general mind. But the order is not intrinsically indifferent; and hence the fundamental reason why education should be a repetition of civilization in little.

Herbert Spencer
When a man's knowledge is not in order, the more of it he has the greater will be his confusion.

Herbert Spencer
The primary use of knowledge is for such guidance of conduct under all circumstances as shall make living complete. All other uses of knowledge are secondary.

Herbert Spencer
The education of the child must accord both in mode and arrangement with the education of mankind, considered historically. In other words, the genesis of knowledge in the individual, must follow the same course as the genesis of knowledge in the race. In strictness, this principle may be considered as already expressed by implication; since both being processes of evolution, must conform to those same general laws of evolution... and must therefore agree with each other. Nevertheless this particular parallelism is of value for the specific guidance it affords. To M. Comte we believe society owes the enunciation of it; and we may accept this item of his philosophy without at all committing ourselves to the rest.

Herbert Spencer
Science is organized knowledge; and before knowledge can be organized, some of it must first be possessed. Every study, therefore, should have a purely experimental introduction; and only after an ample fund of observations has been accumulated, should reasoning begin.

Herbert Spencer
The genuine man of science, we say, can truly know how utterly beyond, not only human knowledge, but human conception, is the Universal Power of which Nature, and Life, and Thought are manifestations. Education

Herbert Spencer
A higher knowledge tends continually to limit our interference with the processes of life.

Herbert Spencer
What is Science? To see the absurdity of the prejudice against it, we need only remark that Science is simply a higher development of common knowledge; and that if Science is repudiated, all knowledge must be repudiated along with it.

Herbert Spencer
Thus to the question with which we set out - What knowledge is of most worth? - the uniform reply is - Science.

Herbert Spencer
Positive knowledge does not, and never can, fill the whole region of possible thought. At the uttermost reach of discovery there arises, and must ever arise, the question - What lies beyond?

Herbert Spencer
What knowledge is of most worth? — the uniform reply is — Science. This is the verdict on all counts.

Herbert Spencer