“Nature does not make leaps.”
La nature ne fait jamais des sauts.
Avant-propos to Nouveaux essais sur l'entendement humain (1704).
A later, more famous Latin version — "Natura non facit saltus" — is from the Philosophia Botanica (1751) by Linnaeus.
A variant translation is "natura non saltum facit" (literally, "Nature does not make a jump") ([Ökonomische Theorie und christlicher Glaube, Andrew, Britton, Peter H., Sedgwick, Burghard, Bock, LIT Verlag Münster, 2008, 978-3-8258-0162-5, 289, https://books.google.com/books?id=goW6JsEUz4EC] Extract of page 289 https://books.google.com/books?id=goW6JsEUz4EC&pg=PA289).
Original
La nature ne fait jamais des sauts.
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Gottfried Leibniz 29
German mathematician and philosopher 1646–1716Related quotes
For My Legionaries: The Iron Guard (1936), Religion
“Nature does not make mistakes. Right and wrong are human categories.”
“Forget the years, forget distinctions. Leap into the boundless and make it your home!”
"Discussion on Making All Things Equal".
“The human imagination leaps to form the whole, to complete the scene in order to make sense of it.”
Source: The Courage to Create (1975), Ch. 7 : Passion for Form, p. 131
Context: The human imagination leaps to form the whole, to complete the scene in order to make sense of it. The instantaneous way this is done shows how we are driven to construct the remainder of the scene. To fill the gaps is essential if the scene is to have meaning. That we may do this in misleading ways — at times in neurotic or paranoid ways — does not gainsay the central point. Our passion for form expresses our yearning to make the world adequate to our needs and desires, and, more important, to experience ourselves as having significance.
Source: When Gravity Fails (1986), Chapter 2 (p. 20).
as quoted in the text of the exhibition 'Kandinsky and der Blaue Reiter', Gemeentemuseum the Hague, Netherlands; February-June, 2010
Gabriele refers to the big change she made, before the period of her first Murnau landscape paintings (c. 1904 - 1914), when she lived and worked together with Kandinsky].
Book I, satire i, line 48
Satires (c. 35 BC and 30 BC)
“Great leaps forward in history are often, in fact, giant leaps back.”
The Reactionary Temptation (2017)
Context: Great leaps forward in history are often, in fact, giant leaps back. The Reformation did initiate brutal sectarian warfare. The French Revolution did degenerate into barbarous tyranny. Communist utopias — allegedly the wave of an Elysian future — turned into murderous nightmares. Modern neoliberalism has, for its part, created a global capitalist machine that is seemingly beyond anyone’s control, fast destroying the planet’s climate, wiping out vast tracts of life on Earth while consigning millions of Americans to economic stagnation and cultural despair.
And at an even deeper level, the more we discover about human evolution, the more illusory certain ideas of progress become.