Scientific literature

“ Seen in its subjective aspect, each of the steps in the growth of this adjustment is a recognition of a scientific law, the perception of the permanency of a relation between external phenomena; for science is simply the recognition of the order of nature. ”

“ In any special natural science, a scientific description appears as an adjustment, express, conscious, exact, of the internal structure of a system of ideas to the external structure of a world of preexistent facts; and the business of science has been repeatedly defined, of late years, as simply and wholly taken up with the exact description of the facts of nature. ”

“ Science being proved truth, scientific method requires that all the factors which concern the subject of research shall be duly considered, in order to arrive at correct thought respecting the special subject of inquiry. ”

“ What I do deny is, that the reading up of books on science—which is, strictly speaking, a literary study either is or can possibly be a training in scientific method. To receive facts in science on any other authority than that of the facts themselves ”

“ Now that science has entered into her kingdom and the vastness of her domain is willingly recognized,—for in a vital sense all that may be known by human ken, supported by evidence, presented in orderly arrangement, related to other knowledge, and developed by further study may be called science,—the busy problem is the infusion of the scientific method into all our ways of thinking, its application to all the various kinds of beliefs that affect our ideals, our working conceptions, and our actions. ”

“ Science, therefore, following one cause to its various effects, while art traces one effect to its multiplied and diversified causes and conditions, there is need of a set of intermediate scientific truths, derived from the higher generalities of science, and destined to serve as the generalia or first principles of the various arts. ”

“ The special science, because special or partial and because at the same time courting scientific character or validity, that is, conformity with reality, must be relative, formal, abstract, artificial, unreal, but also for exactly the same reason it must contrive to admit to its conceptions other view-points than its own. ”

“ The scientific method ignores no faculty of man or fact in Nature; it recognizes to the full our emotions, affections, and sentiments, but subordinates all these to the intellect, whose dictum alone is given command over the educated will. Authority relies on inspiration, revelation, the miraculous, and the supernatural; science relies on brain, on experience, the mastery of facts by accurate and patient thought. ”

“ My success in your cause must be attributed to my having followed the path of experiment and induction discovered by philosophers who have preceded me: willingly would I divide your plaudits with other men of science, and claim much for the general glory of scientific discovery in a long course of ages. ”

“ We have dwelt long enough on these generalities, and it is time to come down to commonplaces, and to inquire what are the essential conditions of this scientific culture which shall fit us to investigate Nature; and the first thought that occurs to me in this connection may be expressed thus: Science presents to us two aspects, which I may call its objective and its subjective aspect. Objectively it is a body of facts, which we have to observe, and subjectively it is a body of truths, conclusions, or inferences, deduced from these facts ”

“ Thus science as an activity is marked off by its method and its intent rather than by its subject-matter. As a method it is characterized by thoroughness, persistency, completeness, generality, and system. As regards its intent, it is characterized by its freedom from partiality or prejudice, and its interest in discovering what the facts are, apart from personal expectations and desires. In the scientific mood we wish to know what the nature of things is. ”

“ Prominent attention has been also devoted to those various sciences which help to a better understanding of the nature of man, to the bearings of science upon the questions of society and government, to scientific education, and to the conflicts which spring from the progressive nature of scientific knowledge. ”

“ We see in many of the brute creation the exercise of one, at least, of the same powers of reasoning as that which we ourselves employ.
The method of scientific investigation is nothing but the expression of the necessary mode of working of the human mind. ”

“ If we content ourselves with what we can obtain, we shall find that the descriptions of science are creative and fertile, and not sterile, as descriptions usually are. As we have already explained, a scientific description is creative in that it allows us to foresee and to foretell. ”

“ That these great truths are as important an element of scientific culture as experimental skill, the author has also endeavored to illustrate, and he has added brief notices of the lives of two noble men of science which may add force to the illustrations. ”

“ But in each of those sciences we shall obtain solid and complete systems of knowledge, only so far as we study, with steady thought and careful observation, that peculiar kind of cause which is appropriate to the phenomena under our consideration. ”

“ Mathematics and physics and chemistry and biology and psychology, not to say also the social sciences, all depend upon the far-seeing mystical visions of the mind, if not of the eye, upon the subtle, logical constructions which their would-be scientific specialism, their desire to know all things narrowly, forces upon them. ”

“ Aims at a critical comparison of scientific methods of thought, with special reference to the relations between biology and the " exact sciences " of chemistry and physics.
"Interesting and valuable . . . original and striking . . . should be read and studied by all thinking men and women." — Education. ”

“ Why should the scientist escape the questioning of other men? Subtle and wonderful as science is, does it transcend humanity? Surely, when all is said, the scientific consciousness is not formally different from the ordinary consciousness. ”

“ Your foreword states that this tale contains the best science of all the prize-winning stories submitted.
"Now, in a scientifiction story, I quite understand, and appreciate, that wealth of imagination, such as inventions, new powers, discoveries of new chemical, physical and psychic laws, and their adaptations, is wholly creditable to the authors, because, indeed, as you state, 'extravagant fiction today—cold fact tomorrow.'
"Now, to come to my point it is not, however, good science to cause a scientific impossibility, a logical impossibility, a direct contradiction, to appear in a story. ”

“ This task, official and unofficial, is in no way different from those fulfilled by the man of science and the practical man, both of whom are perpetually dealing with additional items of information. But mark the difference in the artist's way of accomplishing this task: a scientific fact is embodied in the progressive mass of knowledge, assimilated, corrected; a practical fact is taken in consideration, built upon ”

“ A clear-cut conception of the purposes and methods of scientific investigation and of the scope of the several sciences is a dearly bought product of generations of well-directed, as also of misdirected, effort. ”

“ The scientific intellect, both in the individual and in the race, must learn in the move elementary studies that art of investigation and those canons of proof which are to be put in practice in the more elevated. ”

“ If we choose to define positive science as the systematic establishment of the special laws of connection between facts, we may say that over and above the scientific problem of the systematisation of facts there is the further philosophical problem of their interpretation. ”

“ It implies a clear account of what that is which entitles any portion of knowledge to the designation of scientific, what the methods are by which vague, and narrow or imperfect knowledge may become science, what the principles may be which mark off one science into a province distinct from another, and what the bond of connexion among all the sciences is, with the scale of their relative value and importance, and the place of each as a part of that organic whole into which the philosophic mind seeks to mould all its knowledge. ”

“ This list of studies, which might be multiplied and varied to any extent according to individual proclivities, incloses large areas of knowledge over the subjects of which the human will and human passions must have, at least in the course of ages, and in passing from country to country, an amount of influence which seems to set scientific precision at defiance. ”

“ An exposition and discussion of the Fundamental Ideas of each Science may, with great propriety, be termed the Philosophy of such Science. These ideas contain in themselves the elements of those truths which the science discovers and enunciates; and in the progress of the sciences, both in the world at large and in the mind of each individual student, the most important steps consist in apprehending these ideas clearly, and in bringing them into accordance with the observed facts. ”

“ For what is the history of every science but the history of the elimination of the notion of creative, or other interferences, with the natural order of the phænomena which are the subject-matter of that science? ”

“ We have already stated, that real scientific progress requires distinct general Ideas, applied to many special and certain Facts. In the period of which we now have to speak, men’s Ideas were obscured ”

“ Our Science has been built on the labours of scientific men in past ages. New generalisations imagined by one thinker, new crucial experiments devised by another, new instruments of observation invented by another,—these have been the steps by which Science has grown and established its authority and enlarged its dominion. ”

“ Having so fully examined, in the preceding instances, the nature of the progress of thought which science implies, both among the peculiar cultivators of science, and in that wider world of general culture which receives only an indirect influence from scientific discoveries, we shall not find it necessary to go into the same extent of detail with regard to the other provinces of human knowledge. ”

“ Persons of this class are specially numerous in the ranks of the scientists, whose habit of close observation, and rigorous demand for established facts as the basis of all theoretical views, unfit them for acceptance of any doctrines insusceptible of rigid demonstration from the scientific standpoint. ”

“ The experimental feature of scientific study has thus attained an importance and perfection never before approached, and this cause largely contributes to popularize even the most abstruse subject of inquiry. ”

“ Of science itself, of its hypotheses, methods, and results, they have never known anything. Science was at one time the fashion. The daily press of that date said, ‘We live in a scientific age’; the news of the day reported the travels and marriages of scientists; the feuilleton-novels contained witty allusions to Darwin; the inventors of elegant walking-sticks and perfumes called their productions ‘Evolution Essence’ or ‘Selection Canes’; those who [115] affected culture took themselves seriously for the pioneers of progress and enlightenment. ”

“ Science did not progress until it rejected all innate ideas or phantasies, and applied itself deeply to its proper methods, to observation, to meditation on the correlation of forces, and to experiment. ”

“ The Trend of Scientific Investigations.—While research is carried on in many lines, with many different objectives, it may be stated that intense study is devoted to the nature of matter and the direct connection of it with elemental forces. ”

“ First let us turn to the higher class of investigations, wherein that handmaid of science, a true and noble imagination, comes to supplement exact knowledge, to round out and give full form and perfect outline, either shaping a number of disjointed and apparently heterogeneous facts into a harmonious series, or evolving from a mass of confusing and seemingly inexplicable phenomena a theory or law consistent therewith. ”

“ From this brief analysis of concepts it is clear that science and scientific research are not superhuman beings, but an activity or condition of the human mind, distinguished from the ordinary thought of the individual only by system and method, and, [pg 006] commonly, by greater thoroughness and by the united effort of many. It is subject to all the limitations of the human mind. ”

“ In an age and country which boasts of its intelligence it might seem superfluous to say a word in regard to the importance of the cultivation of science, or, in other words, of a knowledge of the laws of the phenomena of the universe of which we form a part, yet it is lamentably the case that few comparatively, especially among statesmen and politicians, and even among those devoted to literature and the fine arts, properly appreciate the influence of abstract science on the present condition of the civilization of the world. ”

“ A new principle of research was everywhere acknowledged, a new method was created, and science, natural and historical, entered upon that astonishing career of discovery whose rich promise for the future we have but begun to anticipate. ”

“ I understand the word science in its old acceptation; a deep rational research into the first principles of things and the origin of our knowledge. At no epoch of history, I dare to say, has this research been carried on by more passionate lovers, by more powerful intelligences, by more magnanimous hearts, than the Mendicant monks of the thirteenth century. ”