William Kingdon Clifford Quotes

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Our lives are guided by that general conception of the course of things which has been created by society for social purposes. Our words, our phrases, our forms and processes and modes of thought, are common property, fashioned and perfected from age to age; an heirloom which every succeeding generation inherits as a precious deposit and a sacred trust to be handled on to the next one, not unchanged but enlarged and purified, with some clear marks of its proper handiwork. Into this, for good or ill, is woven every belief of every man who has speech of his fellows. An awful privilege, and an awful responsibility, that we should help to create the world in which posterity will live.

William Kingdon Clifford
A little reflection will show us that every belief, even the simplest and most fundamental, goes beyond experience when regarded as a guide to our actions. … Even the fundamental "I am," which cannot be doubted, is no guide to action until it takes to itself "I shall be," which goes beyond experience. The question is not, therefore, "May we believe what goes beyond experience?" for this is involved in the very nature of belief; but "How far and in what manner may we add to our experience in forming our beliefs?"

William Kingdon Clifford
The harm which is done by credulity in a man is not confined to the fostering of a credulous character in others, and consequent support of false beliefs.

William Kingdon Clifford
The danger to society is not merely that it should believe wrong things, though that is great enough; but that it should become credulous, and lose the habit of testing things and inquiring into them; for then it must sink back into savagery.

William Kingdon Clifford
If I steal money from any person, there may be no harm done from the mere transfer of possession; he may not feel the loss, or it may prevent him from using the money badly. But I cannot help doing this great wrong towards Man, that I make myself dishonest.

William Kingdon Clifford
When an action is once done, it is right or wrong for ever; no accidental failure of its good or evil fruits can possibly alter that.

William Kingdon Clifford
To sum up: it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.
If a man, holding a belief which he was taught in childhood or persuaded of afterwards, keeps down and pushes away any doubts which arise about it in his mind, purposely avoids the reading of books and the company of men that call into question or discuss it, and regards as impious those questions which cannot easily be asked without disturbing it—the life of that man is one long sin against mankind.

William Kingdon Clifford
Force is not a fact at all, but and idea embodying what is approximately the fact.

William Kingdon Clifford
To know all about anything is to know how to deal with it under all circumstances.

William Kingdon Clifford
Scientific thought does not mean thought about scientific subjects with long names. There are no scientific subjects. The subject of science is the human universe; that is to say, everything that is, or has been, or may be related to man.

William Kingdon Clifford
This sense of power is the highest and best of pleasures when the belief on which it is founded is a true belief, and has been fairly earned by investigation.

William Kingdon Clifford
We look forward to the time when the structure and motions in the inside of a molecule will be so well known that some future Kant or Laplace will be able to make an hypothesis about the history and formation of matter.

William Kingdon Clifford
We may believe what goes beyond our experience, only when it is inferred from that experience by the assumption that what we do not know is like what we know. We may believe the statement of another person, when there is reasonable ground for supposing that he knows the matter of which he speaks, and that he is speaking the truth so far as he knows it. It is wrong in all cases to believe on insufficient evidence; and where it is presumption to doubt and to investigate, there it is worse than presumption to believe.

William Kingdon Clifford
For geometry, you know, is the gate of science, and the gate is so low and small that we can only enter it as a little child.

William Kingdon Clifford
We may always depend upon it that algebra, which cannot be translated into good English and sound common sense, is bad algebra.

William Kingdon Clifford
A man of science... explains as much as ever he can, and then he says, "This is all I can do; for the rest you must ask the next man."

William Kingdon Clifford
The republic of science, which allows no masters, but proved comrades only.

William Kingdon Clifford
We feel much happier and more secure when we think we know precisely what to do, no matter what happens, then when we have lost our way and do not know where to turn.

William Kingdon Clifford
Thought is powerless, except it make something outside of itself: the thought which conquers the world is not contemplative but active.

William Kingdon Clifford
The character of the emotion with which men contemplate the world, the temper in which they stand in the presence of the immensities and the eternities, must depend first of all on what they think the world is.

William Kingdon Clifford
The scientific discovery appears first as the hypothesis of an analogy; and science tends to become independent of the hypothesis.

William Kingdon Clifford
It may have occurred (and very naturally too) to such as have had the curiosity to read the title of this lecture, that it must necessarily be a very dry and difficult subject; interesting to very few, intelligible to still fewer, and, above all, utterly incapable of adequate treatment within the limits of a discourse like this.

William Kingdon Clifford
We know, of course, that the great discoveries - the true and noble paradoxes - have always come from men who by long prenticeship have so far mastered the tools forged by their fathers that they were not tied down to one particular way of using them; we know that Jove's head cannot crack with Minerva unless he have previously swallowed Metis.

William Kingdon Clifford
No simplicity of mind, no obscurity of station, can escape the universal duty of questioning all that we believe.

William Kingdon Clifford
The goodness and greatness of a man do not justify us in accepting a belief upon the warrant of his authority, unless there are reasonable grounds for supposing that he knew the truth of what he was saying. And there can be no grounds for supposing that a man knows that which we, without ceasing to be men, could not be supposed to verify.

William Kingdon Clifford
He who truly believes that which prompts him to an action has looked upon the action to lust after it, he has committed it already in his heart.

William Kingdon Clifford
I hold in fact
(1) That small portions of space are in fact of a nature analogous to little hills on a surface which is on the average flat; namely, that the ordinary laws of geometry are not valid in them.
(2) That this property of being curved or distorted is continually being passed on from one portion of space to another after the manner of a wave.
(3) That this variation of the curvature of space is what really happens in that phenomenon which we call the motion of matter, whether ponderable or etherial.
(4) That in the physical world nothing else takes place but this variation, subject possibly to the law of continuity.

William Kingdon Clifford
We have no right to believe a thing true because everybody says so unless there are good grounds for believing that some one person at least has the means of knowing what is true, and is speaking the truth so far as he knows it. However many nations and generations of men are brought into the witness-box they cannot testify to anything which they do not know. Every man who has accepted the statement from somebody else, without himself testing and verifying it, is out of court; his word is worth nothing at all. And when we get back at last to the true birth and beginning of the statement, two serious questions must be disposed of in regard to him who first made it: was he mistaken in thinking that he knew about this matter, or was he lying?

William Kingdon Clifford
If a belief is not realized immediately in open deeds, it is stored up for the guidance of the future.

William Kingdon Clifford
There is no scientific discoverer, no poet, no painter, no musician, who will not tell you that he found ready made his discovery or poem or picture — that it came to him from outside, and that he did not consciously create it from within.

William Kingdon Clifford