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Quotes from Science and the Unseen World — Arthur Eddington

1882–1944 England

← All quotes by Arthur Eddington

35 quotes

Physical science comes nearest to that complete system of exact knowledge which all sciences have before them as an ideal. Some fall far short of it.

Science and the Unseen World (1929)

Ninety-nine people out of a hundred have not seriously considered what they mean by the term "exist" nor how a thing qualifies itself to be labelled real.

Science and the Unseen World (1929)

The laws of logic do not prescribe the way our minds think; they prescribe the way our minds ought to think.

Science and the Unseen World (1929)

Wherever a way opens we are impelled to seek by the only methods that can be devised for that particular opening, not over-rating the security of our finding, but conscious that in this activity of mind we are obeying the light that is in our nature.

Science and the Unseen World (1929)

If in a community of the blind one man suddenly received the gift of sight, he would have much to tell which would not be at all scientific.

Science and the Unseen World (1929)

Our system of philosophy is itself on trial; it must stand or fall according as it is broad enough to find room for this experience as an element of life.

Science and the Unseen World (1929)

The exploration of the external world by the methods of physical science leads not to a concrete reality but to a shadow world of symbols, beneath which those methods are unadapted for penetrating.

Science and the Unseen World (1929)

We have to build the spiritual world out of symbols taken from our own personality, as we build the scientific world out of the symbols of the mathematician.

Science and the Unseen World (1929)

Materialism in its literal sense is long since dead. … It is … belief in the universal dominance of scientific law which is nowadays generally meant by materialism.

Science and the Unseen World (1929)

Our environment may and should mean something towards us which is not to be measured with the tools of the physicist or described by the metrical symbols of the mathematician.

Science and the Unseen World (1929)

We have travelled far from the standpoint which identifies the real with the concrete. Even the older philosophy found it necessary to admit exceptions; for example, time must be admitted to be real, although no one could attribute to it a concrete nature.

Science and the Unseen World (1929)

Theological or anti-theological argument to prove or disprove the existence of a deity seems to me to occupy itself largely with skating among the difficulties caused by our making a fetish of this word [existence].

Science and the Unseen World (1929)

To those who have any intimate acquaintance with the laws of chemistry and physics the suggestion that the spiritual world could be ruled by laws of allied character is as preposterous as the suggestion that a nation could be ruled by laws like the laws of grammar.

Science and the Unseen World (1929)

It is to this background that our own personality and consciousness belong, and those spiritual aspects of our nature not to be described by any symbolism … to which mathematical physics has hitherto restricted itself.

Science and the Unseen World (1929)

To understand the phenomena of the physical world it is necessary to know the equations which the symbols obey but not the nature of that which is being symbolised. … this newer outlook has modified the challenge from the material to the spiritual world.

Science and the Unseen World (1929)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Arthur Eddington (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.