William Whewell Quotes

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If many of the guesses of philosophers of bygone times now appear fanciful and absurd, because time and observation have refuted them, others, which were at the time equally gratuitous, have been confirmed in a manner which makes them appear marvellously sagacious.

William Whewell
Experience can discover universal truths, though she cannot give them universality.

William Whewell
The historian of science, from early periods to the present times, may hope for favour on the score of the mere subject of his narrative, and in virtue of the curiosity which the men of the present day may naturally feel respecting the events and persons of his story.

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
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
Ideas are not transformed, but informed Sensations; for without ideas, sensations have no form.

William Whewell
The truth of tentative hypotheses must be tested by their application to facts. The discoverer must be ready, carefully to try his hypotheses in this manner, and to reject them if they will not bear the test, in spite of indolence and vanity.

William Whewell
The character of the true philosopher is, not that he never conjectures hazardously, but that his conjectures are clearly conceived, and brought into rigid contact with facts. He sees and compares distinctly the Ideas and the Things; - the relations of his notions to each other and to phenomena.

William Whewell
If the Greeks had not cultivated Conic Sections, Kepler could not have superseded Ptolemy; if the Greeks had cultivated Dynamics, Kepler might have anticipated Newton.

William Whewell
The present generation finds itself the heir of a vast patrimony of science; and it must needs concern us to know the steps by which these possessions were acquired, and the documents by which they are secured to us and our heirs for ever.

William Whewell
All speculations on subjects in which Science and Religion bear upon each other are liable to one of the two opposite charges[:] that the speculator sets Philosophy and Religion at variance; or that he warps Philosophy into a conformity with Religion.

William Whewell
Terminology must be conventional, precise, constant; copious in words, and minute in distinctions, according to the needs of the science. The student must understand the terms, directly according to the convention, not through the medium of explanation or comparison.

William Whewell
All architecture, to possess genuine beauty, must be mechanically consistent. The decorative members must represent a structure which has in it a principle of support and stability.

William Whewell
[The law of gravitation] is indisputably and incomparably the greatest scientific discovery ever made, whether we look at the advance which it involved, the extent of truth disclosed, or the fundamental and satisfactory nature of this truth.

William Whewell
Prudence supposes the value of the end to be assumed, and refers only to the adaptation of the means. It is the relation of right means for given ends.

William Whewell
To trace order and law in that which has been observed, may be considered as interpreting what nature has written down for us, and will commonly prove that we understand her alphabet.

William Whewell
All external objects and events which we can contemplate are viewed as having relations of Space, Time, and Number; and are subject to the general conditions which these Ideas impose, as well as to the particular laws which belong to each class of objects and occurrences.

William Whewell
All who discover truths, must have reasoned upon many errours to obtain each truth.

William Whewell
According to the technical language of old writers, a thing and its qualities are described as subject and attributes; and thus a man's faculties and acts are attributes of which he is the subject. The mind is the subject in which ideas inhere. Moreover, the man's faculties and acts are employed upon external objects; and from objects all his sensations arise. Hence the part of a man's knowledge which belongs to his own mind, is subjective: that which flows in upon him from the world external to him, is objective.

William Whewell
[The inhabitants of Jupiter] it would seem, be cartilaginous and glutinous masses.... If life be there, it does not seem in any way likely, that the living things can be anything higher in the scale of being, than such boneless, watery, pulpy creatures.

William Whewell
Metaphysical discussions are not to be put in opposition to the study of facts; but are to be stimulated, nourished and directed by a constant recourse to experiment and observation.

William Whewell
Advances in knowledge are not commonly made without the previous exercise of some boldness and license in guessing. The discovery of new truths requires, undoubtedly, minds careful and fertile in examining what is suggested; but it requires, no less, such as are quick and fertile in suggesting.

William Whewell
In order that the facts obtained by observation and experiment may be capable of being used in furtherance of our exact and solid knowledge, they must be apprehended and analysed according to some Conceptions which, applied for this purpose, give distinct and definite results, such as can be steadily taken hold of and reasoned from.

William Whewell
The catastrophist constructs theories, the uniformitarian demolishes them.

William Whewell
The use of every organ has been discovered by starting from the assumption that it must have been some use.

William Whewell
The mystery of creation is not within the range of [Nature's] legitimate territory; [Nature] says nothing, but she points upwards.

William Whewell
But with regard to the material world, we can at least go so far as this;-we can perceive that events are brought about, not by insulated interpositions of Divine power, exerted in each particular ease, but by the establishment of general laws.

William Whewell
And so no force however great can stretch a cord however fine into an horizontal line which is accurately straight.

William Whewell
I have considered the two terms you want to substitute for eisode and exode, and upon the whole I am disposed to recommend instead of them anode and cathode. These words may signify eastern and western way, just as well as the longer compounds which you mention...I may mention too that anodos and cathodos are good genuine Greek words, and not compounds coined for the purpose.

William Whewell