History of the Inductive Sciences Quotes

“The Epochs here marked out, are the cardinal points of scientific history.”

“[W]e must consider the history of the speculations concerning motion in general, terrestrial as well as celestial.”

“It is highly necessary to our purpose, to describe the baffled enterprises as well as the achievements of human speculation.”

“All attempts to reason by means of Definitions from common Notions, lead to empty forms or entire confusion.”

“The eminence on which we stand may enable us to see the land of promise, as well as the wilderness through which we have passed.”

“Real speculative knowledge demands the combination of the two ingredients;—right reason, and facts to reason upon.”

“I do not mean to assert that Descartes borrowed his doctrines from Kepler, or from any of his predecessors; for the theory was sufficiently obvious...”

“To give a real significance to our propositions, Induction must provide what Deduction cannot supply. From a pictured hook we can hang only a pictured chain.”

“It is the progress of knowledge only which we have to attend to. ...Our narrative will therefore consist mainly of successive steps of generalization.”

“True knowledge is the interpretation of nature; and thus it requires both the interpreting mind, and nature for its subject; both the document, and the ingenuity to read it aright.”

“The completeness of historical view... consists, not in accumulating all the details of the cultivation of each science, but in marking clearly the larger features of its formation.”

“In order to understand the conditions of the progress of knowledge, we must attend, in some measure, to the failures as well as the successes by which such attempts have been attended.”

“They ought to have collected clear Fundamental Ideas from the world of things by inductive acts of thought; they only derived results by Deduction from one or other of their familiar Conceptions.”

“[H]uman knowledge lost more by the perversion of men's minds and the misdirection of their efforts, than it gained by any increase of zeal arising from the peculiar hopes and objects of the mystics.”

“Nor... was it easy for any one at Kepler's time to devise a more plausible theory than the theory of vortices... It was only with the formation and progress of the science of mechanics that this theory became untenable.”

“The earlier truths are not expelled but absorbed, not contradicted but extended; and the history of each science, which may thus appear like a succession of revolutions, is, in reality, a series of developements.”

“A very important advantage would be gained, if any light could be thrown upon the modes of discovering truth, the powers that we possess for this end, and the points to which these may most profitably be applied.”

“According to [Aristotle], vision must be produced by a Medium,—by something between the object and the eye,—for if we press the object on the eye, we do not see it; this Medium is Light, or "the transparent in action."”

“The temper... which introduces... supernatural communion into the general course of its speculations, may be properly treated as mystical, and as one of the causes of the decline of science in the Stationary Period.”

“We shall frequently have to notice the manner in which great discoveries... stamp their impress upon the terms of a science; and like great political revolutions, are recorded by the change of the current coin which has accompanied them.”