The Novum Organon: Or, A True Guide to the Interpretation of Nature

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The University Press, 1855 - Science - 338 pages
 

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Page 182 - Again ; the mathematical postulate, that " things which are equal to the same are equal to one another," is similar to the form of the syllogism in logic, which unites things agreeing in the middle term.
Page 111 - ... one another; and nevertheless the very beholding of the light is itself a more excellent and a fairer thing than all the uses of it;— so assuredly the very contemplation of things, as they are, without superstition or imposture, error or confusion, is in itself more worthy than all the fruit of inventions.
Page 82 - But not only is a greater abundance of experiments to be sought for and procured, and that too of a different kind from those hitherto tried; an entirely different method, order, and process for carrying on and advancing experience must also be introduced. For experience, when it wanders in its own track, is, as I have already remarked, mere groping in the dark, and confounds men rather...
Page 109 - It is the glory of God to conceal a thing : but the honour of kings is to search out a matter.
Page 68 - : noted accurately, tend wholly to the unfair circumscription of human power, and to a deliberate and factitious despair ; which not only disturbs the auguries of hope, but also cuts the sinews and spur of industry, and throws away the chances of experience itself...
Page 78 - They who have handled the sciences have been either empirics or dogmatists. The empirics, like the ant, amass only and use; the dogmatists, like spiders, spin webs out of themselves. But the course of the bee lies midway — she gathers materials from the flowers of the garden and the field, and then by her own powers changes and digests them.
Page 40 - Nor again is it a less evil, that in their philosophies and contemplations their labour is spent in investigating and handling the first principles of things and the highest generalities of nature ; whereas utility and the means of working result entirely from things intermediate. Hence it is that men cease not from abstracting nature till they come to potential and uninformed...
Page 13 - We have no sound notions either in logic or physics ; substance, quality, action, passion, and existence are not clear notions ; much less, weight, levity, density, tenuity, moisture, dryness, generation, corruption, attraction, repulsion, element, matter, form, and the like.
Page 34 - Homoeomera of Anaxagoras; the Atoms of Leucippus and Democritus; the Heaven and Earth...

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