“…The pursuit of mathematics is a divine madness of the human spirit…”
Source: 1920s, Science and the Modern World (1925), Ch. 2: "Mathematics as an Element in the History of Thought"
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Alfred North Whitehead 112
English mathematician and philosopher 1861–1947Related quotes

Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, Volume 30 (1924), p. 289.

1920s, Science and the Modern World (1925)

Source: The Theosophist, Volume 33 http://books.google.co.in/books?id=wJ9VAAAAYAAJ, p. 190

Source: The Value of Science (1905), Ch. 5: Analysis and Physics
Context: All laws are... deduced from experiment; but to enunciate them, a special language is needful... ordinary language is too poor...
This... is one reason why the physicist can not do without mathematics; it furnishes him the only language he can speak. And a well-made language is no indifferent thing;
... the analyst, who pursues a purely esthetic aim, helps create, just by that, a language more fit to satisfy the physicist.
... law springs from experiment, but not immediately. Experiment is individual, the law deduced from it is general; experiment is only approximate, the law is precise...
In a word, to get the law from experiment, it is necessary to generalize... But how generalize?... in this choice what shall guide us?
It can only be analogy.... What has taught us to know the true profound analogies, those the eyes do not see but reason divines?
It is the mathematical spirit, which disdains matter to cling only to pure form.<!--pp.76-77

What is Religion? (1893)

Source: The Nature of the Physical World

“This divine madness enters more or less into all our noblest undertakings.”
Here Longfellow is translating or paraphrasing an expression attributed to a canon of Seville, also quoted as "we shall have a church so great and of such a kind that those who see it built will think we were mad".
Table-Talk (1857)
Context: "Let us build such a church, that those who come after us shall take us for madmen," said the old canon of Seville, when the great cathedral was planned. Perhaps through every mind passes some such thought, when it first entertains the design of a great and seemingly impossible action, the end of which it dimly foresees. This divine madness enters more or less into all our noblest undertakings.