There are three principal means of acquiring knowledge available to us: observation of nature, reflection, and experimentation. Ob...servation collects facts; reflection combines them; experimentation verifies the result of that combination. Our observation of nature must be diligent, our reflection profound, and our experiments exact. We rarely see these three means combined; and for this reason, creative geniuses are not common.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
How often we must remember the art of the surgeon, which, in replacing the broken bone, contents itself with releasing the parts f...rom false position; they fly into place by the action of the muscles. On this art of nature all our arts rely.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of i...nfancy even into the era of manhood.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To develop an empiricist account of science is to depict it as involving a search for truth only about the empirical world, about ...what is actual and observable.... It must involve throughout a resolute rejection of the demand for an explanation of the regularities in the observable course of nature, by means of truths concerning a reality beyond what is actual and observable, as a demand which plays no role in the scientific enterprise.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For man is but the servant and interpreter of nature: what he does and what he knows is only what he has observed of nature's orde...r in fact or in thought; beyond this he knows nothing and can do nothing.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Man, being the servant and interpreter of nature, can do and understand so much and so much only as he has observed in fact or in ...the course of nature: beyond this he neither knows anything nor can do anything.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »