Karl Pearson - The Grammar of Science

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The science of the future, while agnostic as to the supersensuous, will replace knowledge by belief in the perceptual sphere, and reserve the term knowledge for the conceptual sphere - the region of their own concepts and ideas - of ether, atom, organic corpuscle, and Loading. Loading... vital force - of physical and plasmic mechanics.

Karl Pearson
The man who classifies facts of any kind whatever, who sees their mutual relation and describes their sequences, is applying the scientific method and is a man of science.

Karl Pearson
There is no short cut to truth, no way to gain a knowledge of the universe except through the gateway of scientific method.

Karl Pearson
There are periods in the growth of science when it is well to turn our attention from its imposing superstructure and to carefully examine its foundations.

Karl Pearson
We must remember that because a proposition has not yet been proved, we have no right to infer that its converse must be true.

Karl Pearson
The mathematician, carried along on his flood of symbols, dealing apparently with purely formal truths, may still reach results of endless importance for our description of the physical universe.

Karl Pearson
The business of the scientist is to know, and therefore he will not lightly assent to throwing anything into the unknowable.

Karl Pearson
Facts may belong to the past history of mankind, to the social statistics of our great cities, to the atmosphere of the most distant stars, to the digestive organs of a worm, or to the life of a scarcely visible bacillus. It is not the facts themselves which form science, but the method in which they are dealt with.

Karl Pearson
Science in no case can demonstrate any inherent necessity in a sequence, nor prove, with absolute certainty that it must be repeated. Science for the past is a description, for the future a belief; it is not, and has never been, an explanation, if by this word is meant that science shows the "necessity" of any sequence of perceptions.

Karl Pearson
Modern Science, as training the mind to an exact and impartial analysis of facts, is an education specifically fitted to promote sound citizenship.

Karl Pearson
The true aim of the teacher must be to impart an appreciation of method and not a knowledge of facts.

Karl Pearson
If the reader questions whether there is still war between science and dogma, I must reply that there always will be as long as knowledge is opposed to ignorance. To know requires exertion, and it is intellectually easiest to shirk effort altogether by accepting phrases which cloak the unknown in the undefinable.

Karl Pearson
The mystery of space, whether it be the finite space of perception or the infinite space of conception, lies in, and not outside, each human consciousness.

Karl Pearson
The insight into method and the habit of dispassionate investigation which follow from acquaintance with the scientific classification of even some small range of natural facts, give the mind an invaluable power of dealing with other classes of facts as the occasion arises.

Karl Pearson
The ignorance of science means the enforced ignorance of mankind.

Karl Pearson
Our aesthetic judgment demands harmony between the representation and the represented, and in this sense science is often more artistic than modern art.

Karl Pearson
Good science will always be intelligible to the logically trained mind, if that mind can read and translate the language in which science is written.

Karl Pearson
If I have not paid greater attention to my numerous critics, it is not that I have failed to study them; it is simply that I have remained - obstinately it may be - convinced that the views expressed are, relatively to our present state of knowledge, substantially correct.

Karl Pearson
The hard and stony path of classifying facts and reasoning upon them is the only way to ascertain truth. It is the reason and not the imagination which must ultimately be appealed to.

Karl Pearson
That a certain sequence has occurred and recurred in the past is a matter of experience to which we give expression in the concept causation ; that it will continue to recur in the future is a matter of belief to which we give expression in the concept probability.

Karl Pearson
Scientific ignorance may... either arise from an insufficient classification of facts, or be due to the unreality of the facts with which science has been called upon to deal.

Karl Pearson
Science for the past is a description, for the future a belief.

Karl Pearson
All great scientists have, in a certain sense, been great artists; the man with no imagination may collect facts, but he cannot make great discoveries.

Karl Pearson
The classification of facts, the recognition of their sequence and relative significance is the function of science, and the habit of forming a judgment upon these facts unbiassed by personal feeling is characteristic of what may be termed the scientific frame of mind.

Karl Pearson
The scientific method of examining facts is not peculiar to one class of phenomena and to one class of workers; it is applicable to social as well as to physical problems, and we must carefully guard ourselves against supposing that the scientific frame of mind is a peculiarity of the professional scientist.

Karl Pearson
When every fact, every present or past phenomenon of that universe, every phase of present or past life therein, has been examined, classified, and co-ordinated with the rest, then the mission of science will be completed. What is this but saying that the task of science can never end till man ceases to be, till history is no longer made, and development itself ceases?

Karl Pearson
Order and reason, beauty and benevolence, are characteristics and conceptions which we find solely associated with the mind of man.

Karl Pearson
'That all science is description and not explanation, that the mystery of change in the inorganic world is just as great and just as omnipresent as in the organic world, are statements which will appear platitudes to the next generation.

Karl Pearson
The scientific man has above all things to strive at self-elimination [elimination of self] in his judgments..

Karl Pearson
If the reader has once fully grasped that science is an intellectual resume of past experience and a mental balancing of the probability of future experience, he will be in no danger of contrasting the "mechanical explanation" of science with the "intellectual description" of mythology.

Karl Pearson