14 quotes
The acquisition of the most elementary truth does not devolve upon the individual alone: it is pre-effected in the development of the race.
The aim of research is the discovery of the equations which subsist between the elements of phenomena.
Popular Scientific Lectures (1910)
Mathematical and physiological researches have shown that the space of experience is simply an actual case of many conceivable cases, about whose peculiar properties experience alone can instruct us.
Popular Scientific Lectures (1910)
All this, the positive and physical essence of mechanics, which makes its chief and highest interest for a student of nature, is in existing treatises completely buried and concealed beneath a mass of technical considerations.
The Science of Mechanics (1893)
The history of the development of mechanics is quite indispensable to a full comprehension of the science in its present condition. It also affords a simple and instructive example of the processes by which natural science generally is developed.
The Science of Mechanics: A Critical and Historical Account of Its Development (1893)
I don't believe that atoms exist!
The mental operation by which one achieves new concepts and which one denotes generally by the inadequate name of induction is not a simple but rather a very complicated process. Above all, it is not a logical process although such processes can be inserted as intermediary and auxiliary links. The principle effort that leads to the discovery of new knowledge is due to abstraction and imagination.
Erkenntnis und Irrtum: Skizzen zur Psychologie der Forschung (1905)
In reality, the law always contains less than the fact itself, because it does not reproduce the fact as a whole but only in that aspect of it which is important for us, the rest being intentionally or from necessity omitted.
Regard for the true endeavor of philosophy, that of guiding into one common stream the many rills of knowledge, will not be found wanting in my work, although it takes a determined stand against the encroachments of metaphysical methods.
However well fitted atomic theories may be to reproduce certain groups of facts, the physical inquirer who has laid to heart Newton's rules will only admit those theories as provisional helps. and will strive to attain, in some more natural way, a satisfactory substitute.
The Science of Mechanics (1893)
There is no problem in all mathematics that cannot be solved by direct counting. But with the present implements of mathematics many operations can be performed in a few minutes which without mathematical methods would take a lifetime.
Popular Scientific Lectures [McCormack (1898)
Within the short span of a human life and with man's limited powers of memory, any stock of knowledge worthy of the name is unattainable except by the greatest mental economy. Science itself, therefore, may be regarded as a minimal problem, consisting of the completest possible presentment of facts with the least possible expenditure of thought.
I have not in every case been able to avoid the use of the abbreviated and precise terminology of mathematics. To do so would have been to sacrifice matter to form; for the language of everyday life has not yet grown to be sufficiently accurate for the purposes of so exact a science as mechanics.
Contributions to the analysis of the sensations (1897), translated by Cora May Williams, published by Open Court Publishing Company, p. 4