Condition Quotes (8)
Certainty is the most vivid condition of ignorance and the most necessay condition for knowledge.
Quotations: Superultramodern Science and Philosophy (2005), 2
Harvard Law: Under the most rigorously controlled conditions of pressure, temperature, humidity, and other variables, the organism will do as it damn well pleases.
The Coevolution Quarterly, Nos. 8-12 (1975), 138.
See also: | Control (11) | Harvard (2) | Murphy's Law (2) | Organism (25) | Pressure (8) | Rigour (4) | Temperature (5) | Variable (3)
I hope you enjoy the absence of pupils ... the total oblivion of them for definite intervals is a necessary condition for doing them justice at the proper time. Letter to Lewis Campbell (21 Apr 1862).
In P. M. Harman (ed.), The Scientific Letters and Papers of James Clerk Maxwell (1990), Vol. 1, 712.
Scientific physiology has the task of determining the functions of the animal body and deriving them as a necessary consequence from its elementary conditions.
Lehrbuch der Physiologie des Menschens (1852), Vol 1, 1. Trans. Paul F. Cranefield, 'The Organic Physics of 1847 and the Biophysics of Today', Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences (1957), 12, 410.
The only objections that have occurred to me are, 1st that you have loaded yourself with an unnecessary difficulty in adopting Natura non facit saltum so unreservedly. . . . And 2nd, it is not clear to me why, if continual physical conditions are of so little moment as you suppose, variation should occur at all. However, I must read the book two or three times more before I presume to begin picking holes.
Comments after reading Darwin's book, Origin of Species.]
Comments after reading Darwin's book, Origin of Species.]
Letter to Charles Darwin (23 Nov 1859). In Charles Darwin and Francis Darwin (ed.), Charles Darwin: His Life Told in an Autobiographical Chapter, and in a Selected Series of His Published Letters (1892), 214.
See also: | Book (39) | Criticism (16) | Difficult (2) | Objection (4) | Occur (2) | Read (10) | Unnecessary (2) | Variation (14)
The role of the teacher is to create the conditions for invention rather than provide ready-made knowledge.
Quoted in Richard Saul Wurman, Information Anxiety 2 (2001), 240.
The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of atomic physics or even of pure mathematics and logic, is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges. Or, to change the figure, total science is like a field of force whose boundary conditions are experience.
'Two Dogmas of Experience,' in Philosophical Review (1951). Reprinted in From a Logical Point of View (1953), 42.
See also: | Atomic Physics (3) | Belief (37) | Boundary (3) | Edge (3) | Experience (57) | Fabric (3) | Geography (11) | History (61) | Knowledge (330) | Logic (66)
… it may happen that small differences in the initial conditions produce very great ones in the final phenomena.
Science and Method (1908) translated by Francis Maitland (2003), 68.
