“Force is not a fact at all, but an idea embodying what is approximately the fact.”
Preface footnote, p. ix. Mr. R. Tucker searched Clifford's note books for Karl Pearson and sent him the above quote, in Clifford's handwriting.
The Common Sense of the Exact Sciences (1885)
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William Kingdon Clifford 48
English mathematician and philosopher 1845–1879Related quotes

Suggestions for Thought : Selections and Commentaries (1994), edited by Michael D. Calabria and Janet A. MacRae, p. 41
Context: Newton's law is nothing but the statistics of gravitation, it has no power whatever.
Let us get rid of the idea of power from law altogether. Call law tabulation of facts, expression of facts, or what you will; anything rather than suppose that it either explains or compels.

" The Influence Of Women On The Progress Of Knowledge http://www.public.coe.edu/~theller/soj/u-rel/buckle.html". Lecture given at the Royal Institution 19 March 1858. In: The Miscellaneous and Posthumous Works of Henry Thomas Buckle (1872)

" Art Dictionary: Lawrence Weiner, A Sculptor of Language http://www.hatjecantz.de/lawrence-weiner-5098-1.html," at hatjecantz.de. 2012.

“What is the case, the fact, is the existence of atomic facts.”
2
Original German: Was der Fall ist, die Tatsache, ist das Bestehen von Sachverhalten.
1920s, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922)

As quoted in The Outer Limits of Reason: What Science, Mathematics, and Logic Cannot Tell Us (MIT Press) 2013 by Yanofsky, Noson S

“What counts is not so much the fact as what the public perceives to be the fact.”
Source: A Distant Mirror (1978), p. 291