William Keith Brooks - The foundations of zoology (1899)

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The man of science quarrels with no man's opinions; but he will not be held responsible for perplexities which are none of his making.

William Keith Brooks
Science has nothing to do with the notion of "necessity," and is quite content to leave it in the hands of its originators, the metaphysicians and theologians and "philosophers," who alone are responsible for all the mental confusion it has brought about.

William Keith Brooks
I s not the biological laboratory which leaves out the ocean and the mountains and meadows a monstrous absurdity? Was not the greatest scientific generalization of your times reached independently by two men who were eminent in their familiarity with living things in their homes?

William Keith Brooks
Nature, as we know it, consists, in the main of permutations and combinations.

William Keith Brooks
Men of science repudiate the opinion that natural laws are rulers and governors over nature; looking with suspicion on all "necessary" or "universal" laws.

William Keith Brooks
Life is response to the order of nature...

William Keith Brooks
The hardest of intellectual virtues is philosophic doubt, and the mental vice to which we are most prone is our tendency to believe that lack of evidence for an opinion is a reason for believing something else.

William Keith Brooks
Life is that which, when joined to mind, is knowledge, - knowledge in use; and we may be sure that all living things with minds like ours are conscious of some part of the order of nature, for the response in which life consists is response to this order.

William Keith Brooks
Order is not an explanation of anything; but something that itself calls for explanation.

William Keith Brooks
The physical sciences deal with the external world, and in the laboratory we study the structure and activities of organisms by very similar methods; but if we stop here, neglecting the relation of the living being to its environment, our study is not biology or the science of life.

William Keith Brooks