Jacob Bronowski: Trending quotes (page 4)

“The symbol and the metaphor are as necessary to science as to poetry.”

Jacob Bronowski

Part 2: "The Habit of Truth", §6 (p. 36)
Science and Human Values (1956, 1965)

Science

“Science and the arts shared the same language at the Restoration. They no longer seem to do so today. …they lack the same language. And it is the business of each of us to make that one universal language which alone can unite art and science, and layman and scientist, in a common understanding.”

Jacob Bronowski

"Sense and Sensibility"
The Common Sense of Science (1951)

Art , Understanding , Business , Universe

“Christopher Columbus discovered the West Indies, and Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. We do not call their achievements creations because they are not personal enough. The West Indies were there all the time; and as for the telephone, we feel that Bell's ingenious thought was somehow not fundamental. The groundwork was there, and if not Bell then someone else would have stumbled on the telephone almost as accidently as on the West Indies.
By contrast, we feel that Othello is genuinely a creation. This is not because Othello came out of a clear sky; it did not. There were Elizabethan dramatists before William Shakespeare, and without them he could not have written as he did. Yet within their tradition Othello remains profoundly personal; and though every element in the play has been a theme of other poets, we know that the amalgam of these elements is Shakespeare's; we feel the presence of his single mind. The Elizabethan drama would have gone on without Shakespeare, but no one else would have written Othello…”

Jacob Bronowski

Source: The Creative Process, 1958, p. 97-98: As quoted in: S.P. Sector (‎1997). A Study of Issues Relating to the Patentability of Biotechnological Subject Matter. Footnote 51. https://www.ic.gc.ca/eic/site/ippd-dppi.nsf/eng/ip00201.html

Feeling , Time , Personality

“Mass, time, magnetic moment, the unconscious: we have grown up with these symbolic concepts, so that we are startled to be told that man had once to create them for himself. He had indeed, and he has: for mass is not an intuition in the muscle, and time is not bought ready-made at the watchmaker's.”

Jacob Bronowski

Part 2: "The Habit of Truth", §5 (p. 35)
Science and Human Values (1956, 1965)

Time

“Blake and Coleridge and Wilberforce were… contemporaries of Arkwright and James Watt. Against this, those who hold the illusion that pre-industrial England was more sensitive and cultured, point to the misery of the manufacturing age. …[T]errible evils …are …far older than 1800 and the machines. But in the factory these evils became naked and public; and the driving force for reform came from the men of the mill, from Robert Owen and the elder Peel.”

Jacob Bronowski

The Common Sense of Science (1951)

Men , Age , Evil

“[I]nterest, say in mathematics, has usually been killed by routine teaching, exactly as the literary interest… has been killed…”

Jacob Bronowski

"Sense and Sensibility"
The Common Sense of Science (1951)

Mathematics

“[T]he invention of photography has made the painter and the patron lose interest in the likeness and transfer it to some more formal pattern. Our whole sensibility has been re-created by such subtle shifts.”

Jacob Bronowski

"Sense and Sensibility"
The Common Sense of Science (1951)

“Almost everything that we do that is worth doing is done in the first place in the mind's eye.”

Jacob Bronowski

"The Reach of Imagination" (1967)

“The force that makes the winter grow
Its feathered hexagons of snow,
and drives the bee to match at home
Their calculated honeycomb,
Is abacus and rose combined.

An icy sweetness fills my mind,
A sense that under thing and wing
Lies, taut yet living, coiled, the spring.”

Jacob Bronowski

Part 4: "The Abacus and the Rose" (fin)
Science and Human Values (1956, 1965)

Home , Spring , Sense , Bee

“Science is not an impersonal construction. It is no less, and no more, personal than any other form of communicated thought. …Science searches the common experience of people; and it is made by people, and it has their style. …The style of Newton's work, as much as the content, dominated science for two centuries… The science of an age, like its art or its music, has style… But it has content and structure too, larger than the work of any one man…”

Jacob Bronowski

"The Scientific Revolution and the Machine"
The Common Sense of Science (1951)

People , Age , Art , Music

“Human beings can imagine situations which are different from those in front of their eyes… because they make and hold in their minds images for absent things.”

Jacob Bronowski

"The Imaginative Mind in Art" (1978)

Imagination

“When a child… discovers his own imagination, he suddenly walks into a new life. …seeing situations that do not exist. …in part as fantasy, and in part as a quite rational exploration of future experiences. …play …frolics in the fantasy world, and it experiments in the rational world… They project themselves into all worlds, possible and impossible, and discover for themselves the knife-edge boundary between them.”

Jacob Bronowski

"The Imaginative Mind in Art" (1978)

Life , World , Imagination , Future

“Has there ever been a society which has died of dissent? Several have died of conformity in our lifetime.”

Jacob Bronowski

Part 3: "The Sense of Human Dignity", §5 (p. 61)
Science and Human Values (1956, 1965)

“[T]he human reason discovers new relations between things not by deduction, but by that unpredictable blend of speculation and insight… induction, which—like other forms of imagination—cannot be formalized.”

Jacob Bronowski

"The Reach of Imagination" (1967)

Imagination

“It's said that science will dehumanize people and turn them into numbers. That's false, tragically false. Look for yourself. This is the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz. This is where people were turned into numbers. Into this pond were flushed the ashes of some four million people. And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance, it was done by dogma, it was done by ignorance. When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave. This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of gods.Science is a very human form of knowledge. We are always at the brink of the known; we always feel forward for what is to be hoped. Every judgment in science stands on the edge of error and is personal. Science is a tribute to what we can know although we are fallible. In the end, the words were said by Oliver Cromwell: "I beseech you in the bowels of Christ: Think it possible you may be mistaken."I owe it as a scientist to my friend Leo Szilard, I owe it as a human being to the many members of my family who died here, to stand here as a survivor and a witness. We have to cure ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge and power. We have to close the distance between the push-button order and the human act. We have to touch people.”

Jacob Bronowski The Ascent of Man

Episode 11: "Knowledge or Certainty"
The Ascent of Man (1973)

Men , People , Family , Hope

“I write… for laymen and scientists, because the reader who is interested in any activity which needs thought and judgement is… a person to whom science can be made to speak, It is not he who is deaf, but the specialists who have been dumb—the specialists in the arts as well as in the sciences.”

Jacob Bronowski

"Sense and Sensibility"
The Common Sense of Science (1951)

Art , Science , Personality

“All great scientists have used their imaginations freely, and let it ride them to outrageous conclusions without crying "Halt!"”

Jacob Bronowski

"The Reach of Imagination" (1967)

Imagination , Cry

“To imagine means to make images and to move them about inside one's head in new arrangements.”

Jacob Bronowski

"The Reach of Imagination" (1967)

Imagination

“Not here to worship what is known, but to question it.”

Jacob Bronowski

Question