Morris Raphael Cohen Quotes

14 Sourced Quotes

In regard to the terrors as well as the superstitions and immoralities of religion, it will not do to urge that they are due only to the imperfections of the men who professed the various religions. If religion cannot restrain evil, it cannot claim effective power for good.

Morris Raphael Cohen
Unlike the physicist, the psychologist … investigates processes that belong to the same order—perception, learning, thinking—as those by which he conducts his investigation.

Morris Raphael Cohen
Conservatism clings to what has been established, fearing that, once we begin to question the beliefs that we have inherited, all the values of life will be destroyed.

Morris Raphael Cohen
Liberalism, on the other hand, regards life as an adventure in which we must take risks in new situations, in which there is no guarantee that the new will always be the good or the true, in which progress is a precarious achievement rather than inevitability.

Morris Raphael Cohen
Liberalism is an attitude rather than a set of dogmas - an attitude that insists upon questioning all plausible and self-evident propositions, seeking not to reject them but to find out what evidence there is to support them rather than their possible alternatives.

Morris Raphael Cohen
It has generally been assumed that of two opposing systems of philosophy, e. g., realism and idealism, one only can be true and one must be false; and so philosophers have been hopelessly divided on the question, which is the true one.

Morris Raphael Cohen
There is... no genuine progress in scientific insight through the Baconian method of accumulating empirical facts without hypotheses or anticipation of nature. Without some guiding idea we do not know what facts to gather... we cannot determine what is relevant and what is irrelevant.

Morris Raphael Cohen
The number of available analogies is a determining factor in the growth and progress of science.

Morris Raphael Cohen
The progress of science always depends upon our questioning the plausible, the respectably accepted, and the seemingly self-evident.

Morris Raphael Cohen
The concept of average was developed in the Rhodian laws as to the distribution of losses in maritime risks.

Morris Raphael Cohen
Begin with collecting the facts? Ay, but what facts?

Morris Raphael Cohen
The safety of science depends on there being men who care more for the justice of their methods than for any results obtained by their use.

Morris Raphael Cohen
If by logic is meant a clear, accurate, and orderly intellectual procedure, then the subject of logic, as presented in current textbooks, comes near being the most illogical in our chaotic curriculum.

Morris Raphael Cohen
The certainty which science aims to bring about is not a psychologic feeling about a given proposition but a logical ground on which its claim to truth can be founded.

Morris Raphael Cohen