Natural Philosophy Quotes

• As in Mathematicks, so in Natural Philosophy, the Investigation of difficult Things by the Method of Analysis, ought ever to precede the Method of Composition. This Analysis consists in making Experiments and Observations, and in drawing general Conclusions from them by Induction, and admitting of no Objections against the Conclusions, but such as are taken from Experiments, or other certain Truths. For Hypotheses are not to be regarded in experimental Philosophy.

  Isaac Newton

  Truth, Philosophy, Taken

  Optics Book III, Part I

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• Histories make men wise; poets, witty; the mathematics, subtle; natural philosophy, deep; moral, grave; logic and rhetoric, able to contend.

  Francis Bacon

  Wise, Witty, Philosophy

  'Essays' (1625) 'Of Studies'

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• I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy.

  John Adams

  Education, Philosophy, War

  John Adams (2003). “The Letters of John and Abigail Adams”, p.264, Penguin

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• I am myself an empiric in natural philosophy, suffering my faith to go no further than my facts. I am pleased, however, to see the efforts of hypothetical speculation, because by the collisions of different hypotheses, truth may be elicited and science advanced in the end.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Philosophy, Effort, Suffering

  Thomas Jefferson, Henry Augustine Washington (1854). “The Writings of Thomas Jefferson: Correspondence, cont”, p.260

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• Live in the fields, and God will give you lectures on natural philosophy every day.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Philosophy, Giving, Tree

  Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edward Waldo Emerson, Waldo Emerson Forbes (1910). “Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1820-1872 [1876] Ed”

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• We must reason in natural philosophy not from what we hope, or even expect, but from what we perceive.

  Humphry Davy

  Philosophy, Reason, Natural

  Humphry Davy (1840). “The Collected Works of Sir Humphry Davy (etc.)”, p.303

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• Science itself is badly in need of integration and unification. The tendency is more and more the other way ... Only the graduate student, poor beast of burden that he is, can be expected to know a little of each. As the number of physicists increases, each specialty becomes more self-sustaining and self-contained. Such Balkanization carries physics, and indeed, every science further away, from natural philosophy, which, intellectually, is the meaning and goal of science.

  Isidor Isaac Rabi

  Philosophy, Knowledge, Science

  New Scientist, Vol. 21, No. 374, January 16, 1964.

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• If alpha [the fine-structure constant] were bigger than it really is, we should not be able to distinguish matter from ether [the vacuum, nothingness], and our task to disentangle the natural laws would be hopelessly difficult. The fact however that alpha has just its value 1/137 is certainly no chance but itself a law of nature. It is clear that the explanation of this number must be the central problem of natural philosophy.

  Max Born

  Philosophy, Law, Numbers

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• what are the objects of an useful American education? classical knowlege, modern languages & chiefly French, Spanish, & Italian; Mathematics; Natural philosophy; Natural History; Civil History; Ethics.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Philosophy, Educational, Italian

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• For even they who compose treatises of medicine or natural philosophy in verse are denominated Poets: yet Homer and Empedocles have nothing in common except their metre; the former, therefore, justly merits the name of the Poet; while the other should rather be called a Physiologist than a Poet.

  Aristotle

  Philosophy, Names, Medicine

  Aristotle (1815). “Aristotle's Treatise on Poetry”, p.66

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• That which is now called natural philosophy, embracing the whole circle of science, of which astronomy occupies the chief place, is the study of the works of God, and of the power and wisdom of God in his works, and is the true theology.

  Thomas Paine

  Philosophy, Circles, Study

  Thomas Paine (2016). “THOMAS PAINE Ultimate Collection: Political Works, Philosophical Writings, Speeches, Letters & Biography (Including Common Sense, The Rights of Man & The Age of Reason): The American Crisis, The Constitution of 1795, Declaration of Rights, Agrarian Justice, The Republican Proclamation, Anti-Monarchal Essay, Letters to Thomas Jefferson and George Washington…”, p.415, e-artnow

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• The harmony of the world is made manifest in Form and Number, and the heart and soul and all the poetry of Natural Philosophy are embodied in the concept of mathematical beauty.

  D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson

  Education, Philosophy, Heart

  D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson (1992). “On Growth and Form”, p.326, Cambridge University Press

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• The main Business of Natural Philosophy is to argue from Phænomena without feigning Hypotheses, and to deduce Causes from Effects till we come to the very first Cause, which certainly is not mechanical; and not only to unfold the Mechanism of the World, but chiefly to resolve these, and to such like Questions.

  Isaac Newton

  Philosophy, Science, World

  Sir Isaac Newton (1782). “Isaaci Newtoni Opera quae exstant omnia”, p.237

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• Our imagination is struck only by what is great; but the lover of natural philosophy should reflect equally on little things.

  Alexander von Humboldt

  Philosophy, Imagination, Littles

  Alexander von HUMBOLDT (1869). “Personal narrative of travels to the equinoctial regions of America”, p.288

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• We find sects and parties in most branches of science; and disputes which are carried on from age to age, without being brought to an issue. Sophistry has been more effectually excluded from mathematics and natural philosophy than from other sciences. In mathematics it had no place from the beginning; mathematicians having had the wisdom to define accurately the terms they use, and to lay down, as axioms, the first principles on which their reasoning is grounded. Accordingly, we find no parties among mathematicians, and hardly any disputes.

  Thomas Reid

  Philosophy, Party, Issues

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• All the sciences have a relation, greater or less, to human nature; and...however wide any of them may seem to run from it, they still return back by one passage or another. Even Mathematics, Natural Philosophy, and Natural Religion, are in some measure dependent on the science of MAN; since they lie under the cognizance of men, and are judged of by their powers and faculties.

  David Hume

  Running, Philosophy, Lying

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• The whole drift of our law is toward the absolute prohibition of all ideas that diverge in the slightest form from the accepted platitudes, and behind that drift of law there is a far more potent force of growing custom, and under that custom there is a natural philosophy which erects conformity into the noblest of virtues and the free functioning of personality into a capital crime against society.

  H. L. Mencken

  Freedom, Philosophy, Ideas

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• Geology, perhaps more than any other department of natural philosophy, is a science of contemplation. It requires no experience or complicated apparatus, no minute processes upon the unknown processes of matter. It demands only an enquiring mind and senses alive to the facts almost everywhere presented in nature. And as it may be acquired without much difficulty, so it may be improved without much painful exertion.

  Humphry Davy

  Philosophy, Science, Mind

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• The mere man of pleasure is miserable in old age, and the mere drudge in business is but little better, whereas, natural philosophy, mathematical and mechanical science, are a continual source of tranquil pleasure, and in spite of the gloomy dogmas of priests and of superstition, the study of these things is the true theology; it teaches man to know and admire the Creator, for the principles of science are in the creation, and are unchangeable and of divine origin.

  Thomas Paine

  Philosophy, Knowledge, Science

  Thomas Paine (2003). “The Age of Reason”, p.118, Book Tree

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• Thanks to the high standing which science has for so long attain and to the impartiality of the Nobel Prize Committee, the Nobel Prize for Physics is rightly considered everywhere as the highest reward within the reach of workers in Natural Philosophy.

  Guglielmo Marconi

  Philosophy, Long, Rewards

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• I will simply express my strong belief, that that point of self-education which consists in teaching the mind to resist its desires and inclinations, until they are proved to be right, is the most important of all, not only in things of natural philosophy, but in every department of dally life.

  Michael Faraday

  Strong, Philosophy, Teaching

  Michael Faraday (1859). “Experimental researches in Chemistry and Physics ... Reprinted from the Philosophical Transactions of 1821-1857; the Journal of the Royal Institution ... and other publications”, p.477

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• In science its main worth is temporary, as a stepping-stone to something beyond. Even [Newton's] Principia ... is truly but the beginning of a natural philosophy. Co-author with his brother Julius Hare.

  Augustus William Hare

  Brother, Philosophy, Science

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• We should remember that there was once a discipline called natural philosophy. Unfortunately, this discipline seems not to exist today. It has been renamed science, but science of today is in danger of losing much of the natural philosophy aspect.

  Hannes Alfven

  Philosophy, Science, Discipline

  "Hannes Alfvén: Dean of the Plasma Dissidents". Book by Anthony L. Peratt, p. 192, 1998.

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• This incomparable Author having at length been prevailed upon to appear in public, has in this Treatise given a most notable instance of the extent of the powers of the Mind; and has at once shown what are the Principles of Natural Philosophy, and so far derived from them their consequences, that he seems to have exhausted his Argument, and left little to be done by those that shall succeed him.a

  Edmond Halley

  Philosophy, Science, Mind

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• I do not think the division of the subject into two parts - into applied mathematics and experimental physics a good one, for natural philosophy without experiment is merely mathematical exercise, while experiment without mathematics will neither sufficiently discipline the mind or sufficiently extend our knowledge in a subject like physics.

  Balfour Stewart

  Philosophy, Exercise, Science

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