"Action Current Study in Movement Coordination" in Journal of General Psychology (1939)
“Mathematical and physiological researches have shown that the space of experience is simply an actual case of many conceivable cases, about whose peculiar properties experience alone can instruct us.”
Source: 20th century, Popular Scientific Lectures, (Chicago, 1910), p. 205; On the space of experience.
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Ernst Mach 12
Austrian physicist and university educator 1838–1916Related quotes
from On the Method of Theoretical Physics, p. 183. The Herbert Spencer Lecture, delivered at Oxford (10 June 1933). Quoted in Einstein's Philosophy of Science http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/einstein-philscience/
1930s
Context: Our experience hitherto justifies us in trusting that nature is the realization of the simplest that is mathematically conceivable. I am convinced that purely mathematical construction enables us to find those concepts and those lawlike connections between them that provide the key to the understanding of natural phenomena. Useful mathematical concepts may well be suggested by experience, but in no way can they be derived from it. Experience naturally remains the sole criterion of the usefulness of a mathematical construction for physics. But the actual creative principle lies in mathematics. Thus, in a certain sense, I take it to be true that pure thought can grasp the real, as the ancients had dreamed.
Richard Courant, What is Mathematics?, (1941) p. xix
Bk. 3, chap. 4; as cited in: Moritz (1914, 240)
System of positive polity (1852)
'Search for the Real in the Visual Arts', p. 40-48
'Search for the Real in the Visual Arts', p. 43
Search for the Real and Other Essays (1948)
Inaugural address (1837)
“Our brains deal exclusively with special-case experiences.”
1960s, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1963)
Context: Our brains deal exclusively with special-case experiences. Only our minds are able to discover the generalized principles operating without exception in each and every special-experience case which if detected and mastered will give knowledgeable advantage in all instances.
As quoted in Carl Friedrich Gauss: Titan of Science (1955) by Guy Waldo Dunnington. p. 306