Acceptance speech of the National Book Award for Nonfiction (1952); also in Lost Woods: The Discovered Writing of Rachel Carson (1999) edited by Linda Lear, p. 91
“We are perhaps too near the age of transition to see clearly the interplay of all that made for progress. Each of us has had his own peculiar training, his own personal contact with the mighty ones of the immediate past; and this forms as it were a telescopic tube determining limits to our field of vision. No doubt we may range the whole horizon; but after all we look from our own point of vantage.”
On the scientific revolution of the second half of the 19th century, in [Life and Scientific Work of Peter Guthrie Tait: supplementing the two volumes of Scientific papers published in 1898 and 1900, Cambridge University Press, 1911, 1]
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Cargill Gilston Knott 3
British mathematician and physicist 1856–1922Related quotes
“Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.”
"Psychological Observations"
Parerga and Paralipomena (1851), Studies in Pessimism
Variant: Everyone takes the limits of his own vision for the limits of the world.
Source: Studies in Pessimism: The Essays
Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 373.
Source: Attributed, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 257.
Marching Off the Map : And Other Sermons (1952), p. 83
Context: There is the liability of accepting prematurely an artificial horizon for our own character and personality, of losing the horizon of the possible person we might be. It is the danger of considering our character as something static, rather than as something emerging. <!-- Some of us remember the old singsong of the geography class, "bounded on the north, south, east, and west." Not very exciting.
Sermon (1899)