43 quotes
The power to perform is derived in toto from the inanimate world, however many elaborate metamorphoses it may undergo, and through however many organisms, vegetable and animal, it may pass before it reaches man.
Matter, Energy, Consciousness and Spirit (1919)
Radioactive character provides as fine a criterion for quantitative and qualitative analysis as any of the chemical and spectroscopic tests...
The Origins of the Conception of Isotopes (1922)
What is so very simple and clear to us today at first had a very... puzzling character...
The Origins of the Conception of Isotopes (1922)
The moon... is commonly supposed... a dead world, though since the same sun shines upon it as upon us it cannot be really dead.
Matter, Energy, Consciousness and Spirit (1919)
The idea that physical power is one of the attributes of deity, and the conception of an all-powerful being directing the universe and the physical affairs of men, has left behind it a legacy of nothing but calamity.
Matter, Energy, Consciousness and Spirit (1919)
What a scientific man conceives to be the truth is... distinct. He is not concerned.., not... greatly interested, in ultimate, absolute and unattainable truth.
Matter, Energy, Consciousness and Spirit (1919)
But the interest of the average man... must... rest in a just appreciation of the relations of these... worlds, the spiritual and the mechanical, to his own life.
Matter, Energy, Consciousness and Spirit (1919)
Magnetism is in a different world from the "animal magnetism" of Mesmer, and the wireless telegraphy that transmits messages through space affords no justification for believing, or otherwise, in telepathy.
Matter, Energy, Consciousness and Spirit (1919)
[T]here is in man a conscience as well as a consciousness, an ineradicable aspiration towards virtue, which is certainly no less difficult to understand.
Matter, Energy, Consciousness and Spirit (1919)
For good or evil, man has geared his own mechanism with the unbounded machinery of inanimate Nature, and... made possible... elimination of the ugliest features of his existence...
Matter, Energy, Consciousness and Spirit (1919)
In 1905 also the discovery by [Tadeusz] Godlewski of actinium X, an intermediate product between actinium and its emanation, in every way analogous to thorium X, was the commencement of the recognition of the general analogies that existed in the three series.
The Origins of the Conception of Isotopes (1922)
I [will] try to disentangle the real origins of the conception of isotopes.., so far... as I have been connected...
The Origins of the Conception of Isotopes (1922)
Thought, reasoning power, memory, free-will, the aesthetic perceptions of beauty and harmony, the ethical ideas of virtue, justice, duty, and self-sacrifice, and the spiritual aspirations of holiness and triumph over death, divide him from the simplest form of life.
Matter, Energy, Consciousness and Spirit (1919)
[A]ncient creeds are working an infinitude of harm in the world, and nowhere more than to the cause of religion.
Matter, Energy, Consciousness and Spirit (1919)
[G]uidance withdrawn.., processes of life resume their uncontrolled natural direction.
Matter, Energy, Consciousness and Spirit (1919)
A truth... [by] divine revelation must... be supposed... the absolute or ultimate truth... unattainable by... human inquiry.
Matter, Energy, Consciousness and Spirit (1919)
Absolute or Ultimate Truth... may be for ever unattainable... [T]he fundamentals of to-day—matter, electricity, the ether and energy — may in the fullness of time be displaced by still more fundamental conceptions.
Matter, Energy, Consciousness and Spirit (1919)
If, in the external universe, every event and phenomenon occurs in the precise and often predictable way it would occur if the hypothesis were true, that hypothesis is regarded as the truth, until something occurs which proves it to be in error.
Matter, Energy, Consciousness and Spirit (1919)
There is common ground in the position, that even though a single mind might be able to comprehend all that has gone to the evolution and survival of the essentially humane type of man, no single personality could, if isolated, arrive at it by himself.
Matter, Energy, Consciousness and Spirit (1919)
Instead..., of the world gradually cooling by... it must be getting steadily hotter in its interior owing to the energy evolved by the radioactive elements.., unless there are unknown factors... to compensate...
Matter, Energy, Consciousness and Spirit (1919)