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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
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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
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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
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If a belief is not realized immediately in open deeds, it is stored up for the guidance of the future.
William Kingdon Clifford
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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
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Remember, then, that it [science] is the guide of action; that the truth which it arrives at is not that which we can ideally contemplate without error, but that which we may act upon without fear; and you cannot fail to see that scientific thought is not an accompaniment or condition of human progress, but human progress itself.
William Kingdon Clifford
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An atmosphere of beliefs and conceptions has been formed by the labours and struggles of our forefathers, which enables us to breathe amid the various and complex circumstances of our life.
William Kingdon Clifford
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It is hardly in human nature that a man should quite accurately gauge the limits of his own insight; but it is the duty of those who profit by his work to consider carefully where he may have been carried beyond it. If we must needs embalm his possible errors along with his solid achievements, and use his authority as an excuse for believing what he cannot have known, we make of his goodness an occasion to sin.
William Kingdon Clifford
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Every rustic who delivers in the village alehouse his slow, infrequent sentences, may help to kill or keep alive the fatal superstitions which clog his race.
William Kingdon Clifford
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We have no reason to fear lest a habit of conscientious inquiry should paralyse the actions of our daily life.
But because it is not enough to say, "It is wrong to believe on unworthy evidence," without saying also what evidence is worthy, we shall now go on to inquire under what circumstances it is lawful to believe on the testimony of others; and then, further, we shall inquire more generally when and why we may believe that which goes beyond our own experience, or even beyond the experience of mankind.
William Kingdon Clifford
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I am endeavouring in a general way to explain the laws of double refraction on this hypothesis, but have not yet arrived at any results sufficiently decisive to be communicated.
William Kingdon Clifford
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Inquiry into the evidence of a doctrine is not to be made once for all, and then taken as finally settled. It is never lawful to stifle a doubt; for either it can be honestly answered by means of the inquiry already made, or else it proves that the inquiry was not complete.
"But," says one, "I am a busy man; I have no time for the long course of study which would be necessary to make me in any degree a competent judge of certain questions, or even able to understand the nature of the arguments."
Then he should have no time to believe.
William Kingdon Clifford
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Life is not having been told that the man has just waxed the floor.
Ogden Nash
William Kingdon Clifford
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Born:
May 4, 1845
Died:
March 3, 1879
(aged 33)
Bio:
William Kingdon Clifford was an English mathematician and philosopher. Building on the work of Hermann Grassmann, he introduced what is now termed geometric algebra, a special case of the Clifford algebra named in his honour.
Known for:
The Ethics of Belief
The Common Sense Of The Exact Sciences
Elements of Dynamic (1878)
Lectures and Essays (1879)
Most used words:
man
experience
belief
wrong
evidence
action
truth
inquiry
nature
supposing
questions
grounds
life
statement
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