88 quotes
When a child begins to play games... he enters the gateway to reason and imagination together.
The Reach of Imagination (1967)
The whole structure of thought in the Middle Ages is one which we find hard to grasp today. It was an orderly structure, but the principles by which it was ordered seem to us now outlandish and meaningless.
The Common Sense of Science (1951)
Science is a great many things, and I have called them a great many names; but in the end they all return to this: science is the acceptance of what works and the rejection of what does not. That needs more courage than we might think.
The Common Sense of Science (1951)
Science changes our values in two ways. It injects new ideas into the familiar culture. And it subjects it to the pressure of technical change, in the way I have just been describing, until the whole basis of our culture has imperceptibly been remade.
The Common Sense of Science (1951)
It has been one of the most destructive modern prejudices that art and science are different and somehow incompatible interests. We have fallen into the habit of opposing the artistic to the scientific tempers; we even identify them with a creative and a critical approach.
The Common Sense of Science (1951)
The [eighteenth] century settled down in two camps of Philistines: the literary Philistines and, largely to spite them, the scientific Philistines. It was the beginning of the mistaken opposition between them from which we still suffer.
The Common Sense of Science (1951)
Science has nothing to be ashamed of even in the ruins of Nagasaki. The shame is theirs who appeal to other values than the human imaginative values which science has evolved. The shame is ours if we do not make science part of our world...
Imagination is the manipulation of images in one's head... the rational manipulation... as well as the literary and artistic manipulation.
The Reach of Imagination (1967)
If I were giving this lecture fifty years from now, the word "gravitation" would be as old-fashioned as the word "phlogiston" is to us. Relativity has certainly demoted gravitation as a real explanation, just as Priestley's and Lavoisier's analyses and decoding of chemical reactions destroyed the word "phlogiston."
The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination (1978)
These are the moments when the powerful mind or the forceful character feels the ferment of the times, when his thoughts quicken, and when he can inject into the uncertainties of others the creative ideas which will strengthen them with purpose. At such a moment the man who can direct others, in thought or in action, can remake the world.
The Common Sense of Science (1951)
On the one hand, all science, and indeed all thinking starts from and rests upon notions of order; what marks the Middle Ages is that their order was always a hierarchy. And on the other hand what marks the scientific view is not that it turned to the mechanism of causes, but that it saw the world as a mechanism at all—a machine of events.
The Common Sense of Science (1951)
With the... symbolic memory we spell out the future—not one but many futures, which we weigh one against another.
The Reach of Imagination (1967)
I am using the word image in a wide meaning, which does not restrict it to the mind's eye as a visual organ. An image in my usage is what Charles Pierce called a sign...
The Reach of Imagination (1967)
The images play out for us events which are not present in our senses, and... create the future—a future that... may never come to exist in that form.
The Reach of Imagination (1967)
The sneer that science is only critical came from others. It was made by the timid and laboured artists of the nineties in order that they might by comparison appear to be creative and intuitive. Yet this finesse could not hide their own knowledge that the best minds were already being drawn to the more adventurous practice of the new sciences.
The Common Sense of Science (1951)
Many people affect to believe that science has progressively strangled the arts, or distorted them into some unpleasant “modern” form; and therefore that the arts can be revived only by throwing over science. Often of course this is merely an elderly sentiment in favour of the art of our younger days, and the real scapegoat is not science but change.
The Common Sense of Science (1951)
In “The Creative Mind” I set out to show that there exists a single creative activity, which is displayed alike in the arts and in the sciences. It is wrong to think of science as a mechanical record of facts, and it is wrong to think of the arts as remote and private fancies. What makes each human, what makes them universal, is the stamp of the creative mind.
Science and Human Values (2011)
In order to act in a scientific manner, in order to act in a human manner at all, two things are necessary: fact and thought. Science does not consist only a finding the facts; nor is it enough only to think, however rationally. The processes of science are characteristic of human action in that they move by the union of empirical fact and rational thought, in a way which cannot be disentangled.
The Common Sense of Science (1951)
The word "imagination" is... in my title. I want you to think of the following words: visual, vision, and visionary; and image, imagery, imagination. ..."Imagination" is a word which derives from the making of images in the mind, from what Wordsworth called "the inward eye."
The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination (1978)
Science as we know it is indeed a creation of the last three hundred years. It has been made in and by the world that took its settled shape about 1660, when Europe at last shook off the long nightmare of religious wars and settled into a life of inquisitive trade and industry. Science is embodied in those new societies; it has been made by them and has helped to make them.
The Common Sense of Science (1951)