Lancelot Law Whyte Quotes

40 Sourced Quotes

The most productive novelties often spring, in thought as in biological evolution, from more primitive and simpler forms, rather than from differentiated ones which, through their elaboration, have become too specialized to be adaptable to new tasks.

Lancelot Law Whyte
Two extreme interpretations of atomism have persisted through centuries: the näive assumption of objectively real indivisible pieces of matter, and the sophisticated view that "atom" is merely a name given to abstractions which it is convenient to assume in simplifying complex phenomena. The second perhaps stems from Ockham, who wrote in 1330 of "the fiction of abstract nouns"; from John Troland, who in 1704 interpreted material particles as mental fictions; and from countless others down to Ernst Mach, who after starting as a physical atomist came to regard atoms as "mental artifices" or "economical ways of symbolizing experience."
Both views have advantages...

Lancelot Law Whyte
No scientist has yet provided an acceptable definition of "mind" or "mental" that reveals the character of "unconscious mental processes," and no physicist a lucid definition of "elementary particles" that shows how they can appear or disappear, and why there are so many.

Lancelot Law Whyte
Every scientific generation, measured by its most vocal members, exaggerates the historical importance of its own members.... there is a perpetual temptation to study the latest and to neglect the past.

Lancelot Law Whyte
Dogmatism in science is usually mistaken, because the conviction of certainty expresses a psychological compulsion, never any truly compelling reasons or facts. When a view attains wide popularity and seems obviously beyond question, its decline has usually begun or will begin very soon.

Lancelot Law Whyte
The material particle or the conscious mind—has been discovered not to be sufficiently unchanging to be treated as a thing in isolation... but more often to be the opposite: a changing system in a changing environment.

Lancelot Law Whyte
We are indeed a blind race, and the next generation, blind to its own blindness, will be amazed at ours.

Lancelot Law Whyte
Belief in a transcendental divinity arose from a misinterpretation of intimations from the less conscious levels of the mind.... God is in the unconscious, is the unconscious, perhaps.

Lancelot Law Whyte
The idea of the unconscious mental processes was, in many of its aspects, conceivable around 1700, topical around 1800, and became effective around 1900, thanks to the imaginative efforts of a large number of individuals of varied interests in many lands.

Lancelot Law Whyte
Nothing is more surprising than the surprises of history, and nothing more untrustworthy than the uncritical extrapolation of the tendencies of the recent past.

Lancelot Law Whyte