William Stanley Jevons - The principles of science (1874)

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There is little use in obtaining exact measurements of an effect unless we can also exactly measure its conditions.

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

William Stanley Jevons
The dignity of intellect begins with the power of separating points of agreement from those of difference.

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
So far as object is different from object, knowledge is useless and inference impossible. But so far as object resembles object, we can pass from one to the other.

William Stanley Jevons
Every strange phenomenon may be a secret spring which, if rightly touched, will open the door to new chambers in the palace of nature.

William Stanley Jevons
It [probability] is the very guide of life, and hardly can we take a step or make a decision of any kind without correctly or incorrectly making an estimation of probabilities.

William Stanley Jevons
By deductive reasoning and calculation, we must endeavor to anticipate such new phenomena, especially those of a singular and exceptional nature, as would necessarily happen if the hypothesis be true.

William Stanley Jevons
No inductive conclusions are more than probable.

William Stanley Jevons
Simplicity is naturally agreeable to a mind of limited powers, but to an infinite mind all things are simple.

William Stanley Jevons
It is difficult to find persons who can with perfect fairness register facts for and against their own peculiar views. Among uncultivated observers the tendency to remark favourable and forget unfavourable events is so great, that no reliance can be placed upon their supposed observations.

William Stanley Jevons
Our ultimate object in induction must be to obtain the complete relation between the conditions and the effect, but this relation will generally be so complex that we can only attack it in detail.

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

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
"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
So-called original research is now regarded as a profession, adopted by hundreds or men, and communicated by a system of training.

William Stanley Jevons
We must learn to distinguish between what we can know and cannot know - between the questions which admit of solution, and those which only seem to be solved.

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
Nothing is more certain in scientific method than that approximate coincidence alone can be expected. In the measurement of continuous quantity perfect correspondence must be accidental, and should give rise to suspicion rather than to satisfaction.

William Stanley Jevons
The wider our experience, the more minute our examination of the globe, the greater the accumulation of well-reasoned knowledge - the fewer in all probability will be the failures of inference compared with the successes.

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
Experience gives us the materials of knowledge: induction digests those materials, and yields us general knowledge.

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
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
I shall endeavor to show that induction is really the inverse process of deduction.

William Stanley Jevons
Neither in deductive nor inductive reasoning can we add a tittle to our implicit knowledge, which is like that contained in an unread book or a sealed letter.... Reasoning explicates or brings to conscious possession what was before unconscious. It does not create, nor does it destroy, but it transmutes and throws the same matter into a new form.

William Stanley Jevons
Science arises from the discovery of Identity amid Diversity.

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