Great Throughts Treasury

"Fullness of knowledge always and necessarily means some understanding of the depths of our ignorance, and that is always conducive to both humility and reverence."

"We have come from somewhere and are going somewhere. The great architect of the universe never built a stairway that leads to nowhere."

"Assumption that our feeble, finite minds understand completely the basis of the physical universe. This sort of blunder has been made over and over and over again throughout all periods of the world?s history and in all domains of thought. It is the essence of dogmatism?assertiveness without knowledge. This is supposed to be the especial prerogative of religion, and there have been many religious dogmatists, but not a few of them, alas among scientists. Everyone will recognize Mr. Bryan, for example, as a pure dogmatist, but not every scientist will realize that [Darwinist] Ernst Haeckel was an even purer one."

"An attitude of humility and of reverence in the face of nature, to keep? [being] receptive of truth and conscious of the limitations of our finite understanding? of the natural world."

"Civilization consists in the multiplication and refinement of human wants."

"From that night on, the electron?up to that time largely the plaything of the scientist?had clearly entered the field as a potent agent in the supplying of man's commercial and industrial needs? The electronic amplifier tube now underlies the whole art of communications, and this in turn is at least in part what has made possible its application to a dozen other arts. It was a great day for both science and industry when they became wedded through the development of the electronic amplifier tube."

"Cultivate the habit of attention and try to gain opportunities to hear wise men and women talk. Indifference and inattention are the two most dangerous monsters that your ever meet. Interest and attention will insure to you an education."

"Galilean and Newtonian mechanical laws, which in large-scale phenomena had always been found to work. Then brute facts were found having to do with specific heats at low temperatures for example, where the laws of Galilean and Newtonian mechanics simply did not work at all and the dogma of the universality of the mechanical laws was gone."

"I suspect that the changes that have taken place during the last century in the average man's fundamental beliefs, in his philosophy, in his concept of religion. in his whole world outlook, are greater than the changes that occurred during the preceding four thousand years all put together. ... because of science and its applications to human life, for these have bloomed in my time as no one in history had had ever dreamed could be possible."

"Ignorance of the principle of conservation of energy ... does not prevent inventors without background from continually putting forward perpetual motion machines... Also, such persons undoubtedly have their exact counterparts in the fields of art, finance, education, and all other departments of human activity... persons who are unwilling to take the time and to make the effort required to find what the known facts are before they become the champions of unsupported opinions?people who take sides first and look up facts afterward when the tendency to distort the facts to conform to the opinions has become well-nigh irresistible."

"I conceive the essential task of religion to be "to develop the consciences, the ideals, and the aspirations of mankind"."

"If I were confronted with a choice between these two types of dogmatic religion, fundamentalism, and atheism ? I should choose fundamentalism as the less irrational of the two and the more desirable, for atheism is essentially the philosophy of pessimism, denying, as it does, that there is any purpose or trend in nature, or any reason for our trying to fit into and advance a scheme of development."

"Just how we fit into the plans of the Great Architect and how much He has assigned us to do, we do not know, but if we fail in our assignment it is pretty certain that part of the job will be left undone. But fit in we certainly do somehow, else we would not have a sense of our own responsibility. A purely materialistic philosophy is to me the height of unintelligence."

"My idea of an educated person is one who can converse on one subject for more than two minutes."

"Of a fixed number of unchangeable atoms, and then brute facts were found which showed that some of these atoms were changing continuously into other atoms and the dogma of the immutable elements was gone. Then materialism assumed that the universe could be accounted for in terms at least of the motions of ?material? particles of some kind, and then brute facts were found which showed that matter could disappear into radiant energy or ether waves, and the dogma of the conservation of matter was gone, and with it the excuse for the very name materialism."

"Region was found having to do with spectroscopic and X-ray phenomena in which these did not work and another dogma blew up. Then materialistic philosophy asserted that light must be ether waves or corpuscles. It was inconsistent or unintelligible that it could be both, and again brute facts appeared which showed that, whether it was intelligible or not, light acts at one and the same times like both waves and corpuscles, and now every physicist is accepting these apparently contradictory facts ? Then materialism assumed that because the laws of interaction of bodies at slow speeds had been verified they would also hold for high speeds, and brute facts appeared which denied the validity of this generalization and in the denial gave birth to the theory of relativity."

"Indeed, nothing more beautifully simplifying has ever happened in the history of science than the whole series of discoveries culminating about 1914 which finally brought practically universal acceptance to the theory that the material world contains but two fundamental entities, namely, positive and negative electrons, exactly alike in charge, but differing widely in mass, the positive electron?now usually called a proton?being 1850 times heavier than the negative, now usually called simply the electron."

"The fact that Science walks forward on two feet, namely theory and experiment, is nowhere better illustrated than in the two fields for slight contributions to which you have done me the great honour of awarding the Nobel Prize in Physics for the year 1923. Sometimes it is one foot that is put forward first, sometimes the other, but continuous progress is only made by the use of both?by theorizing and then testing, or by finding new relations in the process of experimenting and then bringing the theoretical foot up and pushing it on beyond, and so on in unending alterations."

"The chemist in America has in general been content with what I have called a loafer electron theory. He has imagined the electrons sitting around on dry goods boxes at every corner [viz. the cubic atom], ready to shake hands with, or hold on to similar loafer electrons in other atoms."

"Three ideas stand out above all others in the influence they have exerted and are destined to exert upon the development of the human race: The idea of the Golden Rule, the idea of natural law, and the idea of age-long growth, or evolution."

"The purpose of science is to develop, without prejudice or preconception of any kind, a knowledge of the facts, the laws, and the processes of nature. The even more important task of religion, on the other hand, is to develop the consciences, the ideals, and the aspirations of mankind."

"We have been forced to admit for the first time in history not only the possibility of the fact of the growth and decay of the elements of matter. With radium and with uranium we do not see anything but the decay. And yet, somewhere, somehow, it is almost certain that these elements must be continuously forming. They are probably being put together now in the laboratory of the stars. ... Can we ever learn to control the process. Why not? Only research can tell."

"Willard Gibbs did for statistical mechanics and for thermodynamics what Laplace did for celestial mechanics and Maxwell did for electrodynamics, namely, made his field a well-nigh finished theoretical structure."