William Whewell Quotes

92 Sourced Quotes

Hence no force, however great, can stretch a cord, however fine, into a horizontal line which is accurately straight: there will always be a bending downwards.

William Whewell
We cannot observe external things without some degree of Thought; nor can we reflect upon our Thoughts, without being influenced in the course of our reflection by the Things which we have observed.

William Whewell
It is a test of true theories not only to account for but to predict phenomena.

William Whewell
The system becomes more coherent as it is further extended. The elements which we require for explaining a new class of facts are already contained in our system. Different members of the theory run together, and we have thus a constant convergence to unity. In false theories, the contrary is the case.

William Whewell
Every failure is a step to success. Every detection of what is false directs us towards what is true: every trial exhausts some tempting form of error. Not only so; but scarcely any attempt is entirely a failure; scarcely any theory, the result of steady thought, is altogether false; no tempting form of Error is without some latent charm derived from Truth.

William Whewell
Scientific Ideas can often be adequately exhibited for all the purposes of reasoning, by means of Definitions and Axioms; all attempts to reason by means of Definitions from common Notions, lead to empty forms or entire confusion.

William Whewell
To try wrong guesses is apparently the only way to hit upon right ones.

William Whewell
The main object of the work was to present such a survey of the advances already made in physical knowledge, and of the mode in which they have been made, as might serve as a real and firm basis for our speculations concerning the progress of human knowledge, and the processes by which sciences are formed.

William Whewell
When we speak of material nature as being governed by laws, it is sufficiently evident that we use the term in a manner somewhat metaphorical.

William Whewell
In an advanced Science, the history of the Language of the Science is the history of the Science itself.

William Whewell
When we inquire what Facts are to be made the materials of Science, perhaps the answer which we should most commonly receive would be, that they must be True Facts, as distinguished from any mere inferences or opinions of our own.

William Whewell
Newton's theory [of gravitation] is the circle of generalization which includes all the others [as Kepler's laws, Ptolemy's theory, etc.]; - the highest point of the inductive ascent; - the catastrophe of the philosophic drama to which Plato had prologized; - the point to which men's minds had been journeying for two thousand years.

William Whewell
These sciences have no principles besides definitions and axioms, and no process of proof but deduction; this process, however, assuming a most remarkable character; and exhibiting a combination of simplicity and complexity, of rigor and generality, quite unparalleled in other subjects.

William Whewell
In order to discover the principles on which the mechanical sciences truly rest, we must examine the nature and origin of our knowledge of Causes.

William Whewell
The common operations of chemistry give rise in almost every instance to products which bear no resemblance to the materials employed. Nothing can be so false as to expect that the qualities of the elements shall be still discoverable in an unaltered form in the compound.

William Whewell
The progress of knowledge is the main action of our drama; and all the events which do not bear upon this, though they may relate to the cultivation and the cultivators of philosophy, are not a necessary part of our theme.

William Whewell
The cultivation of ideas is to be conducted as having for its object the connexion of facts; never to be pursued as a mere exercise of the subtilty of the mind, striving to build up a world of its own, and neglecting that which exists about us.

William Whewell
We may best hope to understand the nature and conditions of real knowledge by studying the nature and conditions of the most certain and stable portions of knowledge which we already possess: and we are most likely to learn the best methods of discovering truth by examining how truths, now universally recognized, have really been discovered.

William Whewell
Knowledge requires us to possess both Facts and Ideas...

William Whewell
The hypotheses which we accept ought to explain phenomena which we have observed. But they ought to do more than this: our hypotheses ought to foretell phenomena which have not yet been observed.

William Whewell
The distinction of Fact and Theory is only relative. Events and phenomena, considered as particulars which may be colligated by Induction, are Facts; considered as generalities already obtained by colligation of other Facts, they are Theories.

William Whewell
With his ideas unfolded by education, sharpened by controversy, rectified by metaphysics, he [Man] may understand the natural world, but he cannot invent it.

William Whewell
The tendency of the sciences has long been an increasing proclivity of separation and dismemberment. The mathematician turns away from the chemist; the chemist from the naturalist; between the mathematician and the chemist is to be interpolated a "physician" (we have no English name for him), who studies heat, moisture and the like.

William Whewell
Hypotheses may be useful, though involving much that is superfluous, and even erroneous: for they may supply the true bond of connection of the facts; and the superfluity and error may afterwards be pared away.

William Whewell
Every stage of science has its train of practical applications and systematic inferences, arising both from the demands of convenience and curiosity, and from the pleasure which, as we have already said, ingenious and active-minded men feel in exercising the process of deduction.

William Whewell
Time, inexhaustible and ever accumulating his efficacy, can undoubtedly do much in geology: — but Force, whose limits we cannot measure, and whose nature we cannot fathom, is also a power never to be slighted: and to call in the one to protect us from the other is equally presumptuous to which ever side out superstition leans.

William Whewell
There is a mask of theory over the whole face of nature...

William Whewell
Space is not an object of which we perceive the properties, but a form of our perception; not a thing which affects our senses, but an idea to which we conform the impressions of sense.

William Whewell
The process of scientific discovery is cautious and rigorous, not by abstaining from hypothesis, but by rigorously comparing hypotheses with facts, and by resolutely rejecting all which the comparison does not confirm.

William Whewell
The framing of hypotheses is, for the inquirer after truth, not the end, but the beginning of his work.

William Whewell