Joseph William Mellor Quotes

27 Sourced Quotes

The mists of superstition are always dissipated as positive knowledge extends into wider and wider fields.

Joseph William Mellor
Nearly every inference we make with respect to any future event is more or less doubtful. If the circumstances are favorable, a forecast may be made with a greater degree of confidence than if the conditions are not so disposed.

Joseph William Mellor
Science aims at omniscience. The target, however, appears to recede with increasing knowledge.

Joseph William Mellor
By no process of sound reasoning can a conclusion drawn from limited data have more than a limited application.

Joseph William Mellor
Higher Mathematics is the art of reasoning about numerical relations between natural phenomena; and the several sections of Higher Mathematics are different modes of viewing these relations.

Joseph William Mellor
Experience is the well-spring of true knowledge; experience alone can teach something new; it alone is irrefutable; it alone can give certainty.

Joseph William Mellor
It is now generally recognized that imagination, uncontrolled by facts, has produced all the palsying superstitions which have blinded and cursed the human race - past and present.

Joseph William Mellor
What we wish, said Demosthenes, that we believe; what we expect, said Aristotle that we find.

Joseph William Mellor
Every experiment has the character of a specific question. The skilled experimenter knows what he is asking, and he tries his best to interpret nature's reply, be it affirmative, negative, or evasive.

Joseph William Mellor
However successful a theory or law may have been in the past, directly it fails to interpret new discoveries its work is finished, and it must be discarded or modified. However plausible the hypothesis, it must be ever ready for sacrifice on the altar of observation.

Joseph William Mellor
It cannot be doubted that science in its higher work, requires a supple and well-developed imagination.

Joseph William Mellor
Generalization is the golden thread which binds many facts into one simple description.

Joseph William Mellor
The purity of truth is almost certain to be corrupted when the observer is ruled by preconceived opinions...

Joseph William Mellor
It is the sprite imagination which usually reveals the deeper meaning of facts which have been diligently garnered, and laboriously sifted.

Joseph William Mellor
The purpose of pure science is to observe phenomena and to trace their laws; the purpose of art is to produce, modify, or destroy. Strictly speaking there is no such thing as applied science, for, the moment the attempt is made to apply, science passes into the realm of art.

Joseph William Mellor
Without hypotheses, the experimental method may degenerate into empiricism; without experiments, hypotheses may degenerate into speculation.

Joseph William Mellor
It requires a mind disciplined like a soldier to avoid the natural inclination to look away from unwelcome facts.

Joseph William Mellor
If the evidence of an alleged phenomenon cannot be tested by verification, it is outside the range of science.

Joseph William Mellor
The science of chemistry is man's attempt to classify his knowledge of all the different kinds of matter in the universe; of the ultimate constitution of matter; and of the phenomena which occur when the different kinds of matter react one with another.

Joseph William Mellor
The secret charm of scientific discovery is not in the facts per se, but rather in the extrication of natural relations among the facts one with another.

Joseph William Mellor
Science cannot enter into the dark territory beyond the scope of man's faculties, and where verification, direct or indirect, is not possible. A vivid imagination can people this region with phantasms and be deluded with the hallucination that these creatures of the imagination are real, substantial, objective facts.

Joseph William Mellor
Untutored minds are very prone to mistake inferences for observations, and prepossessions for facts; their observations and their judgments are alike vitiated by dogma and prejudice; they do not seek to investigate, they seek to prove.

Joseph William Mellor
Trial by a combat of wits in disputations has no attraction for the seeker after truth; to him, the appeal to experiment is the last and only test of the merit of an opinion, conjecture, or hypothesis.

Joseph William Mellor
The mind unconsciously assimilates evidence in favour of a pet hypothesis; and a pet hypothesis is apt to grow from a favoured child to a tyrannical master.

Joseph William Mellor
It is a popular belief that the aim of science is to explain things: as a matter of fact, the so-called explanations of science do not usually get much beyond describing the observed facts in the simplest possible terms so as to make their relations with one another clear and intelligible.

Joseph William Mellor
Man has to apply a very weak intellect to a very complicated world; and the resources of the human intellect are too narrow, and the universe is too complex to leave any hope that it will ever be within man's power to carry scientific perfection to Tennyson's last degree of simplicity:.One law, one element.

Joseph William Mellor
Science begins with facts and ends with laws. Law is the essence of facts.

Joseph William Mellor