19 quotes
Ethics is in origin the art of recommending to others the sacrifices required for co-operation with oneself.
Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays (1918)
Mysticism is, in essence, little more than a certain intensity and depth of feeling in regard to what is believed about the universe.
Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays (1918)
The Calculus required continuity, and continuity was supposed to require the infinitely little; but nobody could discover what the infinitely little might be.
Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays (1918)
Every great study is not only an end in itself, but also a means of creating and sustaining a lofty habit of mind.
Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays (1918)
Reason is a harmonising, controlling force rather than a creative one.
Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays (1918)
Those who forget good and evil and seek only to know the facts are more likely to achieve good than those who view the world through the distorting medium of their own desires.
Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays (1918)
A life devoted to science is therefore a happy life, and its happiness is derived from the very best sources that are open to dwellers on this troubled and passionate planet.
Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays (1918)
The theoretical understanding of the world, which is the aim of philosophy, is not a matter of great practical importance to animals, or to savages, or even to most civilized men.
Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays (1918)
A process which led from the amœba to man appeared to the philosophers to be obviously a progress – though whether the amœba would agree with this opinion is not known.
Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays (1918)
When the intensity of emotional conviction subsides, a man who is in the habit of reasoning will search for logical grounds in favour of the belief which he finds in himself.
Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays (1918)
The law of causality, I believe, like much that passes muster among philosophers, is a relic of a bygone age, surviving, like the monarchy, only because it is erroneously supposed to do no harm.
Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays (1918)
Thus mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true.
Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays (1918)
The facts of science, as they appeared to him [Heraclitus], fed the flame in his soul, and in its light, he saw into the depths of the world.
Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays (1918)
A truer image of the world, I think, is obtained by picturing things as entering into the stream of time from an eternal world outside, than from a view which regards time as the devouring tyrant of all that is.
Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays (1918)
If any philosopher had been asked for a definition of infinity, he might have produced some unintelligible rigmarole, but he would certainly not have been able to give a definition that had any meaning at all.
Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays (1918)
Organic life, we are told, has developed gradually from the protozoon to the philosopher, and this development, we are assured, is indubitably an advance. Unfortunately it is the philosopher, not the protozoon, who gives us this assurance.
Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays (1918)
In science men have discovered an activity of the very highest value in which they are no longer, as in art, dependent for progress upon the appearance of continually greater genius, for in science the successors stand upon the shoulders of their predecessors; where one man of supreme genius has invented a method, a thousand lesser men can apply it.
Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays (1918)
Formerly, it was held by philosophers and mathematicians alike that the proofs in Geometry depended on the figure; nowadays, this is known to be false. In the best books there are no figures at all. The reasoning proceeds by the strict rules of formal logic from a set of axioms laid down to begin with.
Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays (1918)
An extra-terrestrial philosopher, who had watched a single youth up to the age of twenty-one and had never come across any other human being, might conclude that it is the nature of human beings to grow continually taller and wiser in an indefinite progress towards perfection; and this generalisation would be just as well founded as the generalisation which evolutionists base upon the previous history of this planet.
Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays (1918)