William Stanley Jevons - Laws Quotes

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Have we not hereditary possessions in our just laws, our free and nobly developed constitution, our rich literature and philosophy, incomparably above material wealth, and which we are beyond all things bound to maintain, improve, and hand down in safety? And do we accomplish this duty in encouraging a growth of industry which must prove unstable, and perhaps involve all things in its fall?

William Stanley Jevons
The laws of thought are natural laws with which we have no power to interfere, and which are of course not to be in any way confused with the artificial laws of a country, which are invented by men and can be altered by them. Every science is occupied in detecting and describing the natural laws which are inflexibly observed by the objects treated in the Science.

William Stanley Jevons
We shall never have a science of economics unless we learn to discern the operation of law even among the most perplexing complications and apparent interruptions.

William Stanley Jevons
The new and wonderful results of the late Dr. Boole's mathematical system of Logic appear to develop themselves as most plain and evident consequences of the self-same process of substitution, when applied to the Primary Laws of Thought. Should my notion be true, a vast mass of technicalities may be swept from our logical text-books, and yet the small remaining part of logical doctrine will prove far more useful than all the learning of the Schoolmen.

William Stanley Jevons
The child which overbalances itself in learning to walk is experimenting on the law of gravity.

William Stanley Jevons
By induction we gain no certain knowledge; but by observation, and the inverse use of deductive reasoning, we estimate the probability that an event which has occurred was preceded by conditions of specified character, or that such conditions will be followed by the event.... I have no objection to use the words cause and causation, provided they are never allowed to lead us to imagine that our knowledge of nature can attain to certainty.... We can never recur too often to the truth that our knowledge of the laws and future events of the external world are only probable.

William Stanley Jevons
The alternatives before us are simple. Our empire and race already comprise one-fifth of the world's population, and by our plantation of new states, by our guardianship of the seas, by our penetrating commerce, by the example of our just laws and firm constitution, and above all by the dissemination of our new arts, we stimulate the progress of mankind in a degree not to be measured. If we lavishly and boldly push forward in the creation and distribution of our riches, it is hard to over-estimate the pitch of beneficial influence to which we may attain in the present. But the maintenance of such a position is physically impossible. We have to make the momentous choice between brief greatness and longer continued mediocrity.

William Stanley Jevons
The truth or untruth of a natural law, when carefully investigated, resolves itself into a high or low degree of probability, and this is the case whether or not we are capable of producing precise numerical data.

William Stanley Jevons
Happily the Universe in which we dwell is not the result of chance, and where chance seems to work it is our own deficient faculties which prevent us from recognizing the operating of Law and of Design.

William Stanley Jevons
"It is the glory of God," said Solomon, "to conceal a thing, but the glory of a king to search it out." The laws of nature are the invaluable secrets which God has hidden, and it is the kingly prerogative of the philosopher to search them out by industry and sagacity.

William Stanley Jevons
Deduction is certain and infallible, in the sense that each step in deductive reasoning will lead us to some result, as certain as the law itself. But it does not follow that deduction will lead the reasoner to every result of a law or combination of laws.

William Stanley Jevons
In truth men never can solve problems fulfilling the complex circumstances of nature. All laws and explanations are in a certain sense hypothetical, and apply exactly to nothing which we can know to exist.

William Stanley Jevons