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Just when did teleological explanations, accounts in terms of use and the Good, become definitely abandoned in favour of the notion that true explanations, of man and his mind as well as of other things, must be in terms of their simplest parts?

— Edwin Arthur Burtt The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science; a Historical and Critical Essay (1925)

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Philosophy

More quotes by Edwin Arthur Burtt

The only way to avoid becoming a metaphysician is to say nothing.

The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science (1925)

The motions of the heavenly bodies could be charted according to Ptolemy just as correctly as according to Copernicus.

The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science (1924)

A student of the history of physical science will assign to Newton a further importance which the average man can hardly appreciate. ...the separation … of positive scientific inquiries from questions of ultimate causation.

The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science (1925)

Founder of exact modern science though he was, Kepler combined with his exact methods and indeed found his motivation for them in certain long discredited superstitions, including what it is not unfair to describe as sunworship.

The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science (1925)

For the Middle Ages man was in every sense the centre of the universe. The whole world of nature was believed to be teleologically subordinate to him and his eternal destiny. Toward this conviction the two great movements which had become united in the medieval synthesis, Greek philosophy and Judeo-Christian theology, had irresistibly led.

The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science; a Historical and Critical Essay (1925)

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The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.

H. P. Lovecraft The Call of Cthulhu (1926)

There is no governor anywhere; you are all absolutely free. There is no restraint that cannot be escaped.

Robert Anton Wilson

Every morning
I shall concern myself anew about the boundary
Between the love-deed-Yes and the power-deed-No
And pressing forward honor reality.

Martin Buber Power and Love (1926)

In the province of the mind, what one believes to be true is true or becomes true, within certain limits to be found experientially and experimentally. These limits are further beliefs to be transcended.

John C. Lilly The Human Biocomputer (1974)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Edwin Arthur Burtt (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.