William Stanley Jevons - Science Quotes

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Science arises from the discovery of Identity amid Diversity.

William Stanley Jevons
There may exist in nature perfect straight lines, triangles, circles, and other regular geometrical figures; to our science it is a matter of indifference whether they do or do not exist, because in any case they must be beyond our powers of perception.

William Stanley Jevons
In abstract mathematical theorems, the approximation to truth is perfect... In physical science, on the contrary, we treat of the least quantities which are perceptible.

William Stanley Jevons
As a science progresses, its power of foresight rapidly increases, until the mathematician in his library acquires the power of anticipating nature, and predicting what will happen in circumstances which the eye of man has never examined.

William Stanley Jevons
Were this indeed a Chaotic Universe, the powers of mind employed in science would be useless to us.

William Stanley Jevons
Numerical precision is the soul of science..

William Stanley Jevons
In no part of physical science can we be free from exceptions and outstanding facts, of which our present knowledge can give no account. It is among such anomalies that we must look for the clues to new realms of facts worthy of discovery. They are like the floating waifs which led Columbus to suspect the existence of the New World.

William Stanley Jevons
In matters of philosophy and science authority has ever been the great opponent of truth. A despotic calm is usually the triumph of error. In the republic of the sciences sedition and even anarchy are beneficial in the long run to the greatest happiness of the greatest number.

William Stanley Jevons
In short, I do not write for mathematicians, nor as a mathematician, but as an economist wishing to convince other economists that their science can only be satisfactorily treated on an explicitly mathematical basis.

William Stanley Jevons
Previous to the time of Pascal, who would have thought of measuring doubt and belief? Who could have conceived that the investigation of petty games of chance would have led to the most sublime branch of mathematical science - the theory of probabilities?

William Stanley Jevons
In any case I hold that there must arise a science of the development of economic forms and relations.

William Stanley Jevons
It seems perfectly clear that Economy, if it is to be a science at all, must be a mathematical science. There exists much prejudice against attempts to introduce the methods and language of mathematics into any branch of the moral sciences. Most persons appear to hold that the physical sciences form the proper sphere of mathematical method, and that the moral sciences demand some other method-I know not what.

William Stanley Jevons
Whoever wishes to acquire a deep acquaintance with Nature must observe that there are analogies which connect whole branches of science in a parallel manner, and enable us to infer of one class of phenomena what we know of another. It has thus happened on several occasions that the discovery of an unsuspected analogy between two branches of knowledge has been the starting point for a rapid course of discovery.

William Stanley Jevons
Logic is not only an exact science, but is the most simple and elementary of all sciences; it ought therefore undoubtedly to find some place in every course of education.

William Stanley Jevons
Nature is to us like an infinite ballot-box, the contents of which are being continually drawn, ball after ball, and exhibited to us. Science is but the careful observation of the succession in which balls of various character present themselves; we register the combinations, notice those which seem to be excluded from occurrence, and from the proportional frequency of those which usually appear we infer the probable character of future drawings.

William Stanley Jevons
One of the first and most difficult steps in a science is to conceive clearly the nature of the magnitudes about which we are arguing.

William Stanley Jevons
It is clear that economics, if it is to be a science at all, must be a mathematical 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 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
In this work I have attempted to treat economy as a calculus of pleasure and pain, and have sketched out, almost irrespective of previous opinions, the form which the science, as it seems to me, must ultimately take.

William Stanley Jevons
You will perceive that economy, scientifically speaking, is a very contracted science; it is in fact a sort of vague mathematics which calculates the causes and effects of man's industry, and shows how it may be best applied. There are a multitude of allied branches of knowledge connected with mans condition; the relation of these to political economy is analogous to the connexion of mechanics, astronomy, optics, sound, heat, and every other branch more or less of physical science, with pure mathematics.

William Stanley Jevons
I used to think I should like to be a bookbinder or bookseller it seemed to me a most delightful trade and I wished or thought of nothing better. More lately I thought I should be a minister, it seemed so serious and useful a profession, and I entered but little into the merits of religion and the duties of a minister. Every one dissuaded me from the notion, and before I arrived at any age to require a real decision, science had claimed me.

William Stanley Jevons
Among minor alterations, I may mention the substitution for the name political economy of the single convenient term economics. I cannot help thinking that it would be well to discard, as quickly as possible, the old troublesome double-worded name of our science.

William Stanley Jevons
The whole value of science consists in the power which it confers upon us of applying to one object the knowledge acquired from like objects; and it is only so far, therefore, as we can discover and register resemblances that we can turn our observations to account.

William Stanley Jevons
I protest against deference to any man, whether John Stuart Mill, or Adam Smith, or Aristotle, being allowed to check inquiry. Our science has become far too much a stagnant one, in which opinions rather than experience and reason are appealed to.

William Stanley Jevons
But, in reality, there is no such thing as an exact science.

William Stanley Jevons