Metaphysics Quotes

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There is no field that will always remain the special province of metaphysics and into which scientific research can never carry any light; there are no "eternally unexplorable" areas.

Richard von Mises

The states of consciousness are all that psychology needs to do her work with. Metaphysics or theology may prove the Soul to exist; but for psychology the hypothesis of such a substantial principle of unity is superfluous.

As long as you are occupied with the mathematical sciences and the technique of logic, you belong to those who walk around the palace in search of the gate.... When you complete your study of the natural sciences and get a grasp of the metaphysics, you enter into the inner courtyard and are in the same house as [God] he.

Men of science, men given to "realism," are likely to make a clean sweep of old interests and sentiments as so much rubbish. They regard religion as superstition, metaphysics as moonshine, art as primitive pastime, and all ritual as monkey-business.

Herbert J. Muller

What the Metaphysics of Quality would do is take this separate category, Quality, and show how it contains within itself both subjects and objects. The Metaphysics of Quality would show how things become enormously more coherent-fabulously more coherent-when you start with an assumption that Quality is the primary empirical reality of the world....... but showing that, of course, was a very big job....

Robert M. Pirsig

The more serious poetry of the race has a philosophical structure of thought. It contains beliefs and conceptions in regard to the nature of man and the universe, God and the soul, fate and providence, suffering, evil and destiny. Great poetry always has, like the higher religion, a metaphysical content. It deals with the same august issues, experiences and conceptions as metaphysics or first philosophy.

Joseph Alexander Leighton

Metaphysics is the clearing house for all fundamental philosophical problems.

Joseph Alexander Leighton

We call metaphysics the Science of Life, because to know pure metaphysics is to renew the life and make death and accident impossible.

Emma Curtis Hopkins

One has to recognize that science is not metaphysics, and certainly not mysticism; it can never bring us the illumination and the satisfaction experienced by one enraptured in ecstasy. Science is sobriety and clarity of conception, not intoxicated vision.

Ludwig von Mises

The metaphysical apologia at least betrayed the injustice of the established order through the incongruence of concept and reality. The impartiality of scientific language deprived what was powerless of the strength to make itself heard and merely provided the existing order with a neutral sign for itself. Such neutrality is more metaphysical than metaphysics.

Metaphysics is the attempt of the mind to rise above the mind.

Religion should be disentangled as much as possible from history and authority and metaphysics, and made to rest honestly on one's fine feelings, on one's indomitable optimism and trust in life.

George Santayana

Psychology, speaking for emotion and instinct, has reduced intellect to impotence over life. Metaphysics has subordinated it to will. Bergson and his followers have charged it with falsehood and issued a general warning against its misrepresentations; while with pragmatists and instrumentalists it has sunk so low that it is dressed in livery and sent to live in the servant's quarters. It is against this last indignity in particular that I wish to speak a word of protest, to the end that the intellect may be accorded full rights within the community of human activities and interests.

Ralph Barton Perry

We deemed the secret lost, the spirit gone,
Which spake in Greek simplicity of thought,
And in the forms of gods and heroes wrought
Eternal beauty from the sculptured stone —
A higher charm than modern culture won,
With all the wealth of metaphysic lore,
Gifted to analyze, dissect explore.

Margaret Fuller

Since science's competence extends to observable and measurable phenomena, not to the inner being of things, and to the means, not to the ends of human life, it would be nonsense to expect that the progress of science will provide men with a new type of metaphysics, ethics, or religion.

Jacques Maritain

I believe that communities which lack the feminine influence are apt to fall into abstraction and the madness of systems which, being false, require violence to put into practice. We have, alas, seen too many examples of this. A masculine civilization like that of ancient Greece perishes through politics, metaphysics, and vanity. Women alone can give these doctrinary drones a sense of the real and simple values of the hive. No true civilization is possible without the collaboration of the two sexes, but there can be no real collaboration unless the differences between the sexes are accepted and a mutual respect established.

He, however, who begins with Metaphysics, will not only become confused in matters of religion, but will fall into complete infidelity.

The children reached manhood without knowing religion, and with the certainty that dogma, metaphysics, and abstract philosophy were not worth knowing. So one-sided an education could have been possible in no other country or time, but it became, almost of necessity, the more literary and political. As the children grew up, they exaggerated the literary and the political interests. They joined in the dinner-table discussions and from childhood the boys were accustomed to hear, almost every day, table-talk as good as they were ever likely to hear again. The eldest child, Louisa, was one of the most sparkling creatures her brother met in a long and varied experience of bright women.

There is no drawing the line between physics and metaphysics. If you examine every day facts at all closely, you are a physicist; but if you press your physics at all home, you become a metaphysician; if you press your metaphysics at all home, you are in a fog.

Samuel Butler (novelist)

For the corporation executives, the military metaphysic often coincides with their interest in a stable and planned flow of profit; it enables them to have their risk underwritten by public money; it enables them reasonably to expect that they can exploit for private profit now and later, the risky research developments paid for by public money. It is, in brief, a mask of the subsidized capitalism from which they extract profit and upon which their power is based.

C. Wright Mills

Consequently he who wishes to attain to human perfection, must therefore first study Logic, next the various branches of Mathematics in their proper order, then Physics, and lastly Metaphysics.

The ability of a scientific theory to be refuted is the key criterion that distinguishes science from metaphysics. If a theory cannot be refuted, if there is no observation that will disprove it, then nothing can prove it - it cannot predict anything, it is a worthless myth.

Throughout the nineteenth century, apart from the division in theoretical sciences and arts, classifiers attempted to divide the sciences into two groups. Already they had before them the examples of Francis Bacon (speculative and descriptive) and Hobbes (quantitative and qualitative). For Coleridge, the sciences were either pure (Grammar, Logic, Rhetoric, Mathematics, Metaphysics) or mixed. Arthur Schopenhauer's similar groups were called pure and empirical, Wilhelm Wundt in 1887 called them formal and empirical, Globot mathematical and theoretical, and the St. Louis Congress of Arts and Sciences (1904) normative and physical. Karl Pearson made similar division of the sciences into abstract and concrete

Brian Campbell Vickery

I put it like this: you can't make a science-fiction film pretending that 2001 [A Space Odyssey] doesn't exist. But I think 2001's relationship with humanity is more philosophical, more abstract. I wanted to embrace the metaphysics, but relate it to something more obviously human, like love.

Christopher Nolan

Logic and metaphysics make use of more tools than all the rest of the sciences put together, and do the least work.

Charles Caleb Colton