Émile Boutroux Quotes

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Science is reduction. Mathematics is its ideal, its form par excellence, for it is in mathematics that assimilation, identification, is most perfectly realized. The universe, scientifically explained, would be a certain formula, one and eternal, regarded as the equivalent of the entire diversity and movement of things.

Émile Boutroux
The senses afford a primary conception of the world, which they show to be a mass of facts, endless in their variety. Man may observe, analyse, and describe them with ever-increasing exactness: this very description constitutes science.

Émile Boutroux
In spite of their relations, science and religion remain, and must remain, distinct. If there were no other way of establishing a rational order between things than that of reducing the many to the one, either by assimilation or by elimination, the destiny of religion would appear doubtful.

Émile Boutroux
There can be nothing clearer or more convenient for the purpose of setting one's ideas in order and for conducting an abstract discussion, than precise definitions and inviolable lines of demarcation.

Émile Boutroux
The philosopher asks himself whether natural law as assumed by science, wholly coincides with law as really existing in nature; whether science and reality are so alike that science may be regarded as exhausting everything intelligible and true that the real contains.

Émile Boutroux
The world is an endless variety of facts, linked together by necessary and immutable bonds.

Émile Boutroux
That which we call the laws of nature is the sum total of the methods we have discovered for adapting things to the mind, and subjecting them to be moulded by the will.

Émile Boutroux