John Tyndall Quotes

78 Sourced Quotes

Between the mind of man and the outer world are interposed the nerves of the human body, which translate, or enable the mind to translate, the impressions of that world into facts of consciousness and thought.

John Tyndall
All our notions of Nature, however exalted or however grotesque, have some foundation in experience.

John Tyndall
Superstition may be defined as constructive religion which has grown incongruous with intelligence.

John Tyndall
Brightness and freshness take possession of the mind when it is crossed by the light of principles, shewing the facts of Nature to be organically connected.

John Tyndall
If you speak to your fellowman, you are not entitled to use jargon. Bad experiments are jargon addressed to Nature, and just as much to be deprecated.

John Tyndall
The ultimate problem of physics is to reduce matter by analysis to its lowest condition of divisibility, and force to its simplest manifestations, and then by synthesis to construct from these elements the world as it stands.

John Tyndall
To him [Faraday], as to all true philosophers, the main value of a fact was its position and suggestiveness in the general sequence of scientific truth.

John Tyndall
The centrifugal form in which knowledge, as a whole, advances, spreading ever wider on all sides, is due in reality to the exertions of individuals, each of whom directs his efforts, more or less, along a single line.

John Tyndall
Slowly, and with difficulty, the notion of natural forces took root in the human mind. Slowly, and with difficulty, the science of mechanics had to grow out of this notion; and slowly at last came the full application of mechanical principles to the motions of the heavenly bodies.

John Tyndall
We can trace the development of a nervous system, and correlate with it the parallel phenomena of sensation and thought. We see with undoubting certainty that they go hand in hand. But we try to soar in a vacuum the moment we seek to comprehend the connexion between them...Man the object is separated by an impassable gulf from man the subject.

John Tyndall
Thus, having exhausted science and reached its very rim, the real mystery of existence still looms around us. And thus it will ever loom - ever beyond the bourne of man's intellect - giving the poets of successive ages just occasion to declare that, We are such stuff As dreams are made of, and our little life Is rounded by a sleep.

John Tyndall
But is it in the human mind to imagine motion without at the same time imagining something moved? Certainly not. The very conception of motion includes that of a moving body.

John Tyndall
Experiments have two great uses - a use in discovery and verification, and a use in tuition. They were long ago defined as the investigator's language addressed to Nature, to which she sends intelligible replies. These replies, however, usually reach the questioner in whispers too feeble for the public ear.

John Tyndall
Scientific men fight shy of the word [imagination] because of its ultrascientific connotations; but the fact is that without the exercise of this power our knowledge of Nature would be a mere tabulation of coexistences and sequences.

John Tyndall
The outward facts of nature are insufficient to satisfy the mind. We cannot be content with knowing that the light and heat of the sun illuminate and warm the world. We are led irresistibly to enquire, 'What is light, and what is heat?' and this question leads us at once out of the region of sense into that of imagination.

John Tyndall
It is the function of science, not as some think to divest this universe of its wonder and its mystery, but, as in the case here before us, to point out the wonder and the mystery of common things.

John Tyndall
A modern discovery illustrates the manner in which our present mastery over nature has been obtained.

John Tyndall
Science must grow. Its development is as necessary and as irresistible as the motion of the tides, or the flowing of the Gulf-Stream.

John Tyndall
The Italian wind, gliding over the crest of the Matterhorn, is as firmly ruled as the earth in its orbital revolution round the sun.

John Tyndall
The energy of Nature is a constant quantity, and the utmost man can do in the pursuit of physical truth, or in the applications of physical knowledge, is to shift the constituents of the never-varying total, sacrificing one if he would produce another.

John Tyndall
We claim, and we shall wrest from theology, the entire domain of cosmological theory.

John Tyndall
Time and intensity are the main factors in geologic change, and they are in a certain sense the convertible. A feeble force acting through long periods, and an intense force acting through short ones, may produce approximately the same results.

John Tyndall
In his efforts to cross the common bourne of the known and the unknown, the effective force of the man of science must depend, to a great extent, upon his acquired knowledge.

John Tyndall
Charles Darwin, the Abraham of scientific men — a searcher as obedient to the command of truth as was the patriarch to the command of God.

John Tyndall
The experimental researches of Faraday are so voluminous, their descriptions are so detailed, and their wealth of illustration is so great, as to render it a heavy labour to master them. The multiplication of proofs, necessary and interesting when the new truths had to be established, are however less needful now when these truths have become household words in science.

John Tyndall