Lancelot Law Whyte Quotes

40 Sourced Quotes

Atomism originally stood for iconoclasm, impiety, and atheism, because the Greek atomists conceived a universe under the reign of chance.

Lancelot Law Whyte
A naturalistic reinterpretation renders all that is authentic about the Christian doctrine greater not less, for it makes it a part of a new and stronger man, not of some fancied "superman," but simply man as he is but less distorted by a dissociating tradition.

Lancelot Law Whyte
Discontinuity of its linguistic and logical terms is for the conscious analytical intellect psychologically and logically prior to notions of continuity.... This functional priority... may not have been reflected in the history of the development of reason in all human communities.... But it is relevant for the West that the Pythagoreans, with their discrete integers and point patterns, came before Euclid, with his continuous metrical geometry, and that physical atomism as a speculative philosophy preceded by some two thousand years the conception of a continuous physical medium with properties of its own.

Lancelot Law Whyte
Faced by the dire nihilism of our time, we need a greater honesty... The Western search for unifying truth did not come to an end with Christianity, any more than with the physical theories of forty years ago.

Lancelot Law Whyte
Physics and psychology are going somewhere, but where they do not know. But... they are traveling from: Democritan permanent particles and the Cartesian mind necessarily aware.... they are both traveling away from the same point of origin and in the same general direction: from the isolation of supposedly permanent "substances" towards the identification of changing relations potentially affecting everything; briefly, from substance to changing relations and structures.

Lancelot Law Whyte
A clue to the future must lie in the past... every scientist, and everyone with intellectual curiosity, can learn something useful from a brief study of the history of atomism.

Lancelot Law Whyte
This essay touches bottom for twentieth century man.... it is one many signals marking the end of "Antiman," with his hopeless relativism, and announcing "Unitary Man,"... able to be more harmonious because he has become aware of the ordering processes at all levels in nature, without and within.... here at last subject and object are potentially fused in a single insight.

Lancelot Law Whyte
We know nothing about the Christian transcendental God except His total indifference both to individual suffering and to the collapse of the pseudo Christian civilization which the Church supported. The pretension to a transcendental authority... was a hypnotic given to children and remaining with them as adults. During one period in history it served a purpose... its early rational opponents... were strangely naive, for they imagined that a half-developed faculty called "reason" should, and could, lead the species. But reason... is not a prime mover.

Lancelot Law Whyte
Theory confronts experiment, and both sides are a mixture of obscurity and clarity.

Lancelot Law Whyte
There is no doubt of the need for an up-to-date, balanced, and comprehensive work on the history of atomism, drawing ideas, mathematics, and experiment together into a single story. When available, it should become required reading for all students of the exact sciences.

Lancelot Law Whyte
The "divine" in man: creative bliss, the experience of perfection, the surprising joys of love all human, not divine.... It is time that God was put in his place, that is, in man, and no nonsense about it. But, to prevent misunderstanding, instead of speaking of the "divine" in man I will call it the human sense of perfection or unity.... Need I add that we may retain the Sermon on the Mount, Saint Paul's poem to charity, and much else, though we discard the Christian God?

Lancelot Law Whyte
The author... has known for that for several centuries freethinkers have led mankind. Only recently... new to him though perhaps long understood by others, possibly Kant and certainly Nietzsche, there emerged into his mind a clarity that will remain... the conception of transcendental divinity is damaging to man.

Lancelot Law Whyte
There are good reasons to expect... a return to a concreteness of basic ideas, to simpler fundamentals easily understood, to principles that will bring exact science closer to the human perspective.

Lancelot Law Whyte
In the vast tapestry of human experience there is nothing so extraordinary, or so challenging to human understanding as the process by which in a partly haphazard world of inorganic materials exploited their own laws so that organisms came into existence, and a cumulative process was started that led to the appearance of man.

Lancelot Law Whyte
Science does not begin with facts; one of its tasks is to uncover the facts by removing misconceptions.

Lancelot Law Whyte
The true aim of science is to discover a simple theory which is necessary and sufficient to cover the facts, when they have been purified of traditional prejudices.

Lancelot Law Whyte
In the ultimate analysis science is born of myth and religion, all three being expressions of the ordering spirit of the human mind.

Lancelot Law Whyte
If the universe is a mingling of probability clouds spread through a cosmic eternity of space-time, how is there as much order, persistence, and coherent transformation as there is?

Lancelot Law Whyte
Science starts with an assumption which is always present, though it may be unconscious, may be forgotten, and may sometimes even be denied.

Lancelot Law Whyte
Only a certain probability remains of a one-to-one association of any spatial feature now with a similar feature a moment later. It is sheer luck, in a sense, that any physical apparatus stays put, for the laws of quantum mechanics allow it a finite, though small, probability of dispersing while one is not looking, or even while one is.

Lancelot Law Whyte
Systematic errors of theory can seldom be discovered by direct attack; it is easier to uncover them by studying how and why physical theory took the path it did. That is why a clue to the future can sometimes be found in the past, and this is my reason for studying the history of atomism.

Lancelot Law Whyte
The basic challenge to mankind is not population, poverty, war, technology, pollution, religious or racial intolerance, or blind nationalism, but an underlying nihilism promoting violence and frustrating sane policies on these issues.... the only hope lies in the emergence of a potentially worldwide consensus of heart, mind, and will, appealing to all sane men and women everywhere... The time has come for the west to speak to the world in universal terms.... the consensus, if it comes, is likely to surprise by its suddenness, timeliness, and universality.

Lancelot Law Whyte
To rob man of his noblest faculty, the experience of and aspiration to perfection and unity in himself, we can now see to have been a truly hellish surgery.

Lancelot Law Whyte
Did ever the history of the intellect so little conceal so much?

Lancelot Law Whyte
The idea that time may be an active factor in causation has the mathematical significance that ' t ' (for the system in question) must appear explicitly in the formulation of the law.... Such law may claim to express the fact of historic, irreversible duration.

Lancelot Law Whyte
The Christian fog of self deception still does its damage: we either deceive ourselves by pretending to believe or overreact into a contempt of all religion. So, away with the fog!

Lancelot Law Whyte
Both science and art have to do with ordered complexity.

Lancelot Law Whyte
We are sick today for lack of simple ideas which can help us be what we want to be.

Lancelot Law Whyte
It is widely believed that only those who can master the latest quantum mathematics can understand anything of what is happening. That is not so, provided one takes the long view, for no one can see far ahead. Against a historical background, the layman can understand what is involved, for example, in the fascinating challenge of continuity and discontinuity expressed in the antithesis of field and particle.

Lancelot Law Whyte
No one is so brilliant that he can afford to neglect what history can teach him.

Lancelot Law Whyte