Jacob Bronowski - The common sense of science (1951)

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Beyond all our actions stands the larger shadow: How are we to choose between what we have been taught to think right and something else which manifestly succeeds?

Jacob Bronowski
These are the moments when the powerful mind or the forceful character feels the ferment of the times, when his thoughts quicken, and when he can inject into the uncertainties of others the creative ideas which will strengthen them with purpose. At such a moment the man who can direct others, in thought or in action, can remake the world.

Jacob Bronowski
Nations in their great ages have not been great in art or science, but in art and science.

Jacob Bronowski
The world makes sense all right; it makes common sense... But common sense is not what we put into the world. It is what we find there.

Jacob Bronowski
The private motives of scientists are not the trend of science. The trend of science is made by the needs of society: navigation before the eighteenth century, manufacture thereafter; and in our age I believe the liberation of personality. Whatever the part which scientists like to act, or for that matter which painters like to dress, science shares the aims of our society just as art does.

Jacob Bronowski
Da Vinci was as great a mechanic and inventor as were Newton and his friends. Yet a glance at his notebooks shows us that what fascinated him about nature was its variety, its infinite adaptability, the fitness and the individuality of all its parts. By contrast what made astronomy a pleasure to Newton was its unity, its singleness, its model of a nature in which the diversified parts were mere disguises for the same blank atoms.

Jacob Bronowski
There are three creative ideas which, each in its turn, have been central to science. They are the idea of order, the idea of causes, and the idea of chance.

Jacob Bronowski
It is not obviously silly to classify flowers by their colors; after all, the bluer flowers do tend to be associated with the colder climates and greater heights. There is nothing wrong with the system in advance. It simply does not work as conveniently and as instructively as Linnaeus's classification by family likenesses.

Jacob Bronowski
Like the voyages of the Spaniards into the fabulous West, Science even at its boldest does the will of history, and in turn helps to determine its movement.

Jacob Bronowski
When Da Vinci wanted an effect, he willed, he planned the means to make it happen: that was the purpose of his machines. But the machines of Newton... are means not for doing but for observing. He saw an effect, and he looked for its cause.

Jacob Bronowski
Science is a great many things... but in the end they all return to this: science is the acceptance of what works and the rejection of what does not. That needs more courage than we might think. It need more courage than we have ever found when we have faced our worldly problems.

Jacob Bronowski
Science is the acceptance of what works and the rejection of what does not. That needs more courage than we might think.

Jacob Bronowski