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The mental operation by which one achieves new concepts and which one denotes generally by the inadequate name of induction is not a simple but rather a very complicated process. Above all, it is not a logical process although such processes can be inserted as intermediary and auxiliary links. The principle effort that leads to the discovery of new knowledge is due to abstraction and imagination.

— Ernst Mach Erkenntnis und Irrtum: Skizzen zur Psychologie der Forschung (1905)

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Imagination

More quotes by Ernst Mach

The acquisition of the most elementary truth does not devolve upon the individual alone: it is pre-effected in the development of the race.

The aim of research is the discovery of the equations which subsist between the elements of phenomena.

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Mathematical and physiological researches have shown that the space of experience is simply an actual case of many conceivable cases, about whose peculiar properties experience alone can instruct us.

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All this, the positive and physical essence of mechanics, which makes its chief and highest interest for a student of nature, is in existing treatises completely buried and concealed beneath a mass of technical considerations.

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The history of the development of mechanics is quite indispensable to a full comprehension of the science in its present condition. It also affords a simple and instructive example of the processes by which natural science generally is developed.

The Science of Mechanics: A Critical and Historical Account of Its Development (1893)

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Nothing is more dangerous to reason than the flights of the imagination, and nothing has been the occasion of more mistakes among philosophers.

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