9 quotes
As you are aware, no perceptions obtained by the senses are merely sensations impressed on our nervous systems.
Popular Lectures on Scientific Subjects (1881)
That member is then capable of the greatest variety of motions; it can compel the most varied instruments to execute the most diverse tasks.
Popular Lectures on Scientific Subjects (1881)
The quantity of force which can be brought into action in the whole of Nature is unchangeable, and can neither be increased nor diminished.
Popular Lectures on Scientific Subjects (1881)
The external work of man is of the most varied kind as regards the force or ease, the form and rapidity, of the motions used on it, and the kind of work produced.
Popular Lectures on Scientific Subjects (1881)
Each individual fact, taken by itself, can indeed arouse our curiosity or our astonishment, or be useful to us in its practical applications. But intellectual satisfaction we obtain only from a connection of the whole, just from its conformity with law.
Popular Lectures on Scientific Subjects (1881)
The sensations of our nerves of sense are mere symbols indicating certain external objects, and it is usually only after considerable practice that we acquire the power of drawing correct conclusions from our sensations respecting the corresponding objects.
Popular Lectures on Scientific Subjects (1881)
There is a kind, I might almost say, of artistic satisfaction, when we are able to survey the enormous wealth of Nature as a regularly ordered whole — a kosmos, an image of the logical thought of our own mind.
Popular Lectures on Scientific Subjects (1881)
The formation of scales and of the web of harmony is a product of artistic invention, and is in no way given by the natural structure or by the natural behaviour of our hearing, as used to be generally maintained hitherto.
The Theory of Sound (1862)
In speaking of the work of machines and of natural forces we must, of course, in this comparison eliminate anything in which activity of intelligence comes into play. The latter is also capable of the hard and intense work of thinking, which tries a man just as muscular exertion does.
Popular Lectures on Scientific Subjects (1881)