Christiaan Huygens: Probability

Christiaan Huygens was Dutch mathematician and natural philosopher. Explore interesting quotes on probability.
Christiaan Huygens: 32   quotes 1   like

“One finds in this subject a kind of demonstration which does not carry with it so high a degree of certainty as that employed in geometry; and which differs distinctly from the method employed by geometers in that they prove their propositions by well-established and incontrovertible principles, while here principles are tested by inferences which are derivable from them. The nature of the subject permits of no other treatment. It is possible, however, in this way to establish a probability which is little short of certainty. This is the case when the consequences of the assumed principles are in perfect accord with the observed phenomena, and especially when these verifications are numerous; but above all when one employs the hypothesis to predict new phenomena and finds his expectations realized.”

Christiaan Huygens book Treatise on Light

Treatise on Light (1690) - preface, Translated by Michael R. Matthews, Scientific Background to Modern Philosophy. 1989. p. 126

Way , Nature , Perfection

“I believe that we do not know anything for certain, but everything probably.”

Christiaan Huygens

Letter to Pierre Perrault, 'Sur la préface de M. Perrault de son traité de l'Origine des fontaines' (1673), Oeuvres Complètes de Christiaan Huygens http://books.google.com/books?id=9IVA7sK_Bh8C (1897), Vol. 7, 298. Quoted in Jacques Roger, The Life Sciences in Eighteenth-Century French Thought, ed. Keith R. Benson and trans. Robert Ellrich (1997), 163

“Now since in so many Things they… agree, what can be more probable than that in others they agree too; and that the other Planets are as beautiful and as well stock'd with Inhabitants as the Earth? Or what shadow of Reason can there be why they should not?”

Christiaan Huygens

Book 1, p. 18
Cosmotheoros (1695; publ. 1698)

Beauty

“There are many degrees of Probable, some nearer Truth than others, in the determining of which lies the chief exercise of our Judgment.”

Christiaan Huygens

Book 1, p. 10
Cosmotheoros (1695; publ. 1698)

Truth , Exercises