Lectures on Ten British Mathematicians of the Nineteenth Century |
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Page 52 - The design of the following treatise is to investigate the fundamental laws of those operations of the mind by which reasoning is performed...
Page 27 - New knowledge, when to any purpose, must come by contemplation of old knowledge, in every matter which concerns thought ; mechanical contrivance sometimes, not very often, escapes this rule. All the men who are now called discoverers, in every matter ruled by thought, have been men versed in the minds of their predecessors, and learned in what had been before them. There is not one exception.
Page 126 - Psychical changes either conform to law or they do not. If they do not conform to law, this work, in common with all works on the subject, is sheer nonsense : no science of Psychology is possible. If they do conform to law, there cannot be any such thing as free will.
Page 64 - As unembodied spirits of direction. And you, ye undevelopable scrolls ! Above the host wave your emblazoned rolls, Ruled for the record of his bright inventions. Ye Cubic surfaces! by threes and nines Draw round his camp your seven-and-twenty lines— The seal of Solomon in three dimensions.
Page 131 - ... sound and sufficient knowledge of mathematics, the great instrument of all exact inquiry, without which no man can ever make such advances in this or any olher of the higher departments of science as can entitle him to form an independent opinion on any subject of discussion within their range.
Page 108 - is that study which knows nothing of observation, nothing of induction, nothing of experiment, nothing of causation.
Page 91 - More Worlds than One. The Creed of the Philosopher and the Hope of the Christian.
Page 84 - But in the heavens we discover by their light, and by their light alone, stars so distant from each other that no material thing can ever have passed from one to another, and yet this light, which is to us the sole evidence of the existence of these distant worlds, tells us also that each of them is built up of molecules of the same kinds as those which we find on earth.
Page 54 - In every discourse, whether of the mind conversing with its own thoughts, or of the individual in his intercourse with others, there is an assumed or expressed limit within which the subjects of its operation are confined.
Page 9 - To give a stronger impulse and a more systematic direction to scientific inquiry, — to promote the intercourse of those who cultivate Science in different parts of the British Empire, with one another, and with foreign philosophers, — to obtain a more general attention to the objects of Science, and a removal of any disadvantages of a public kind which impede its progress.