32 quotes
This ability to order things into likes and unlikes is, I think, the foundation of human thought.
The Common Sense of Science (1951)
A good prediction is one which defines its area of uncertainty; a bad prediction ignores it.
The Common Sense of Science (1951)
There has never been a great book or a powerful work of art which has not been thought immoral by those with an older tradition.
The Common Sense of Science (1951)
If any ideas have a claim to be called creative, because they have created something, then certainly it is the ideas of science.
The Common Sense of Science (1951)
Order is the selection of one set of appearances rather than another because it gives a better sense of the reality behind the appearances.
The Common Sense of Science (1951)
Unhappily, common sense has no recorded history.
The Common Sense of Science (1951)
We do not construct the world from our experiences; we are aware of the world in our experiences.
The Common Sense of Science (1951)
Science is not a special sense. It is as wide as the literal meaning of its name: knowledge.
The Common Sense of Science (1951)
Science is a way of describing reality; it is therefore limited by the limits of observation; and it asserts nothing which is outside observation. Anything else is not science; it is scholastics.
The Common Sense of Science (1951)
There are three creative ideas which, each in its turn, have been central to science. They are the idea of order, the idea of causes, and the idea of chance.
The Common Sense of Science (1951)
The great flood was the seventeenth century. That was the time of change, the hanging moment of instability in which men like Cromwell and Newton could remake the world.
The Common Sense of Science (1951)
The mastery and the greatness of science rests in the end on this, that here the rational and the empirical are knotted together. Science is fact and thought giving strength to one another.
The Common Sense of Science (1951)
The Scientific Revolution revolution was a change from a world of things ordered according to their ideal nature, to a world of events running in a steady mechanism of before and after.
The Common Sense of Science (1951)
At bottom, we have remain individually too greedy to distribute our surplus, and collectively too stupid to pile it up in any more useful form than the traditional mountains of arms.
The Common Sense of Science (1951)
We cannot change our character, we can only enlarge it. If we are wise, then we go on learning all through life, and go on fitting what is new to what we have learnt before, piece by piece.
The Common Sense of Science (1951)
Of course, everyone is free to prefer his favourite article of faith to the scientific, that is the empirical method. But do not let us imagine that his faith is then anything except a piece of comfortable and customary superstition.
The Common Sense of Science (1951)
Here is the ultimate hope of saving ourselves from extinction. We must learn to understand that the contents of all knowledge is empirical; that its test is whether it works; and we must learn to act on that understanding in the world as well as in the laboratory.
The Common Sense of Science (1951)
There has never been another moment in English history to equal the promise of that moment in the 1660’s when the Royal Society was formally founded. And though it was less dramatic elsewhere, it was a high moment throughout Europe.
The Common Sense of Science (1951)
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)