“It is an astonishing feat of deciphering that we should have been able to infer an orderly scheme of natural knowledge from such indirect communication.”

— Arthur Stanley Eddington

III, p.34
Science and the Unseen World (1929)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "It is an astonishing feat of deciphering that we should have been able to infer an orderly scheme of natural knowledge …" by Arthur Stanley Eddington?

Arthur Stanley Eddington photo

Arthur Stanley Eddington105

British astrophysicist 1882–1944

Related quotes

“The idea of a God we infer from our experimental dependence on something superior to ourselves in wisdom, power and goodness, which we call God; our senses discover to us the works of God which we call nature, and which is a manifest demonstration of his invisible essence. Thus it is from the works of nature that we deduce the knowledge of a God, and not because we have, or can have any immediate knowledge of, or revelation from him.”

Ethan Allen (1738–1789) American general

Source: Reason: The Only Oracle Of Man (1784), Ch. V Section II - Containing Observations on the Providence and Agency of God, as it Respects the Natural and Moral World, with Strictures on Revelation in General

“To understand how indirect communication is possible we must grasp what it is about ordinary communication that is being changed.”

David Wood (1946) British philosopher, born 1946

Source: Philosophy At The Limit (1990), Chapter 6, Indirect Communication, p. 110

“At bottom, knowledge of God in faith is always this indirect knowledge of God, knowledge of God in His works, and in these particular works in the determining and using of certain creaturely realities to bear witness to the divine objectivity. What distinguishes faith from unbelief, erroneous faith and superstition is that it is content with this indirect knowledge of God.”

Karl Barth book Church Dogmatics

2:1
Church Dogmatics (1932–1968)

“From semantics to shipbuilding, from dream theory to propositional logic, any specialist … is invariably astonished to discover that modern knowledge was foreshadowed at the time. … Should we not replace these foreshadowings by the study of the influences of Hellenistic thought on modern thought?”

Lucio Russo (1944) Italian historian and scientist

7.6, "The Figurative Arts, Literature and Music", p. 228
The Forgotten Revolution: How Science Was Born in 300 BC and Why It Had to Be Reborn (2004)

“For avoiding nonsense in general, we might accumulate millions of censors. For all we know, this "negative meta-knowledge" — about patterns of thought and inference that have been found defective or harmful — may be a large portion of all we know.”

Marvin Minsky (1927–2016) American cognitive scientist

Jokes and their Relation to the Cognitive Unconscious (1980)

“Knowledge is also inferred from what is accepted as established knowledge, with new knowledge being based on the best explanation. This includes possible truths subject to proof.”

Nayef Al-Rodhan (1959) philosopher, neuroscientist, geostrategist, and author

Source: Sustainable History and the Dignity of Man (2009), p.108

“Authority, when first detecting chaos at its heels, will entertain the vilest schemes to save its orderly facade.”

Alan Moore V for Vendetta

Source: V for Vendetta

“Wisdom is the assimilated knowledge in us, gained from an intelligent estimation and close study of our own direct and indirect experience in the world.”

Chinmayananda Saraswati (1916–1993) Indian spiritual teacher

Quotations from Gurudev’s teachings, Chinmya Mission Chicago

“It is absurd to suppose we can think of nature as a system apart from knowledge, for it is knowledge that is increasingly determining the course of nature”

Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) British-American economist

Source: 1960s, Beyond Economics: Essays on Society, 1968, p. 141 as cited in John Laurent (2003) Evolutionary Economics and Human Nature. p. 175

“We know very little, and yet it is astonishing that we know so much, and still more astonishing that so little knowledge can give us so much power.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

Related topics