“Science does not know its debt to imagination.”

Poetry and Imagination
1870s, Society and Solitude (1870), Books, Letters and Social Aims http://www.rwe.org/comm/index.php?option=com_content&task=category&sectionid=5&id=74&Itemid=149 (1876)

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 "Science does not know its debt to imagination." by Ralph Waldo Emerson?
Ralph Waldo Emerson photo
Ralph Waldo Emerson 727
American philosopher, essayist, and poet 1803–1882

Related quotes

Isaac Asimov photo

“The true artist is quite rational as well as imaginative and knows what he is doing; if he does not, his art suffers. The true scientist is quite imaginative as well as rational, and sometimes leaps to solutions where reason can follow only slowly; if he does not, his science suffers.”

Isaac Asimov (1920–1992) American writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston University, known for his works of science fiction …

Source: The Roving Mind (1983), Ch. 25
Context: How often people speak of art and science as though they were two entirely different things, with no interconnection. An artist is emotional, they think, and uses only his intuition; he sees all at once and has no need of reason. A scientist is cold, they think, and uses only his reason; he argues carefully step by step, and needs no imagination. That is all wrong. The true artist is quite rational as well as imaginative and knows what he is doing; if he does not, his art suffers. The true scientist is quite imaginative as well as rational, and sometimes leaps to solutions where reason can follow only slowly; if he does not, his science suffers.

Fritjof Capra photo
Jacob Bronowski photo

“Science takes its coherence, its intellectual and imaginative strength together, from the concepts at which its laws cross, like knots in a mesh.”

Jacob Bronowski (1908–1974) Polish-born British mathematician

Part 3: "The Sense of Human Dignity", §1 (p. 52)
Science and Human Values (1956, 1965)
Context: No fact in the world is instant, infinitesimal and ultimate, a single mark. There are, I hold, no atomic facts. In the language of science, every fact is a field — a crisscross of implications, those that lead to it and those that lead from it. … We condense the laws around concepts. Science takes its coherence, its intellectual and imaginative strength together, from the concepts at which its laws cross, like knots in a mesh.

Alexis De Tocqueville photo

“The principle of equality does not destroy the imagination, but lowers its flight to the level of the earth.”

Book Three, Chapter XI.
Democracy in America, Volume II (1840), Book Three

Nicolás Gómez Dávila photo

“If philosophy does not resolve any scientific problem, science, in its turn, does not resolve any philosophical problem.”

Nicolás Gómez Dávila (1913–1994) Colombian writer and philosopher

Sucesivos Escolios a un Texto Implícito (1992)

Paul de Lagarde photo

“What was most repulsive at the meetings was the stench of the guild, which assailed me everywhere: intellectual proletariat, that labors on its humdrum articles in the sweat of its brow, that does not know that science is to make one free and happy.”

Paul de Lagarde (1827–1891) German polymath, biblical scholar and orientalist

Paul de Lagarde describing an 1851 convention of philologists, from Paul de Lagarde: Erinnerungen aus seinem Leben für die Freunde zusammengestellt (1894), S. 21, as cited in The Politics of Cultural Despair (1961), p. 12, note

Auguste Comte photo

“To understand a science it is necessary to know its history.”

Auguste Comte (1798–1857) French philosopher

A Course of Positive Philosophy (1832 - 1842) [Six volumes]

Arthur Cecil Pigou photo

“It is not pretended that, at the present stage of its development, economic science is able to provide an organon even remotely approaching to what it imagines for itself as its ideal.”

Arthur Cecil Pigou (1877–1959) British economist

Source: The Economics of Welfare (1920), Ch. 1 : Welfare and Economic Welfare, § 4

“Science is susceptible of infinite progress. But how can science be susceptible of infinite progress if its object does not have an inner infinity?”

Leo Strauss (1899–1973) Classical philosophy specialist and father of neoconservativism

"Why We Remain Jews" (1962)
Context: Science, as the positivist understands it, is susceptible of infinite progress. That you learn in every elementary school today, I believe. Every result of science is provisional and subject to future revision, and this will never change. In other words, fifty thousand years from now there will still be results entirely different from those now, but still subject to revision. Science is susceptible of infinite progress. But how can science be susceptible of infinite progress if its object does not have an inner infinity? The belief admitted by all believers in science today — that science is by its nature essentially progressive, and eternally progressive — implies, without saying it, that being is mysterious. And here is the point where the two lines I have tried to trace do not meet exactly, but where they come within hailing distance. And, I believe, to expect more in a general way, of people in general, would be unreasonable.

Isaac Asimov photo

“Science fiction offers its writers chances of embarrassment that no other form of fiction does.”

Isaac Asimov (1920–1992) American writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston University, known for his works of science fiction …

Robot Dreams (1986), introduction
General sources

Related topics