“Ah, it is the fault of our science that it wants to explain all; and if it explain not, then it says there is nothing to explain.”

1840s, Essays: First Series (1841), Self-Reliance
Context: Your genuine action will explain itself, and will explain your other genuine actions. Your conformity explains nothing. Act singly, and what you have already done singly will justify you now. Greatness appeals to the future. If I can be firm enough to-day to do right, and scorn eyes, I must have done so much right before as to defend me now. Be it how it will, do right now. Always scorn appearances, and you always may. The force of character is cumulative.

Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), p. 17

Sense and Nonsense in Australian History (2005)

Legitimation of Belief (1974), p. 99

&quot;With Science on Our Side&quot; https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/entertainment/books/1994/01/09/with-science-on-our-side/9e5d2141-9d53-4b4b-aa0f-7a6a0faff845/, Washington Post (January 9, 1994) <br class="br">Variant: Not explaining science seems to me perverse. When you&#x27;re in love, you want to tell the world. <br class="br">Source: The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

Source: The Blind Watchmaker (1986), Chapter 6 “Origins and Miracles” (p. 141)

Newtonian Studies (1965).
Context: There is something for which Newton — or better to say not Newton alone, but modern science in general — can still be made responsible: it is splitting of our world in two. I have been saying that modern science broke down the barriers that separated the heavens and the earth, and that it united and unified the universe. And that is true. But, as I have said, too, it did this by substituting for our world of quality and sense perception, the world in which we live, and love, and die, another world — the world of quantity, or reified geometry, a world in which, though there is place for everything, there is no place for man. Thus the world of science — the real world — became estranged and utterly divorced from the world of life, which science has been unable to explain — not even to explain away by calling it "subjective".
True, these worlds are everyday — and even more and more — connected by praxis. Yet for theory they are divided by an abyss.
Two worlds: this means two truths. Or no truth at all.
This is the tragedy of the modern mind which "solved the riddle of the universe," but only to replace it by another riddle: the riddle of itself.

Cosm (1998), Part 6, Chapter 3 (p. 325)

On Pantheism as quoted in Faiths of Famous Men in Their Own Words (1900) by John Kenyon Kilbourn; also in Religion: A Dialogue and Other Essays (2007), p. 40
Essays