“Accounting for the most part, remains a legalistic and traditional practice, almost immune to self-criticism by scientific methods.”

Homilies of Science p. 15
Homilies of Science 1892
Context: Some imagine that science is limited to the lower sorts of natural facts only. Religious and moral facts have been too little heeded by our scientists. Thus people came to think that science and religion move in two different spheres. That is not so. The facts of our soul-life must be investigated and stated with scientific accuracy, and our clergy should be taught to purify religion with the criticism of scientific methods. They need not fear for their religious ideals. So far as they are true, and their moral kernel is true, they will not suffer in the crucible of science. Religion will not lose one iota of its grandeur, if it is based upon a scientific foundation; all that it will lose is the errors that are connected with religion and the sooner they are lost the better for us.

Postmodernism and truth (1998)
Context: The methods of science aren't foolproof, but they are indefinitely perfectible. Just as important: there is a tradition of criticism that enforces improvement whenever and wherever flaws are discovered. The methods of science, like everything else under the sun, are themselves objects of scientific scrutiny, as method becomes methodology, the analysis of methods. Methodology in turn falls under the gaze of epistemology, the investigation of investigation itself — nothing is off limits to scientific questioning. The irony is that these fruits of scientific reflection, showing us the ineliminable smudges of imperfection, are sometimes used by those who are suspicious of science as their grounds for denying it a privileged status in the truth-seeking department — as if the institutions and practices they see competing with it were no worse off in these regards. But where are the examples of religious orthodoxy being simply abandoned in the face of irresistible evidence? Again and again in science, yesterday's heresies have become today's new orthodoxies. No religion exhibits that pattern in its history.

Source: Jesus or Christianity: A Study in Contrasts (1929), p. 2

Source: God: The Failed Hypothesis (2007), Chapter 4: 'Cosmic Evidence', p.126-127

The Scientific Outlook (1931)
1930s
Context: The most essential characteristic of scientific technique is that it proceeds from experiment, not from tradition. The experimental habit of mind is a difficult one for most people to maintain; indeed, the science of one generation has already become the tradition of the next...

To Sir Thomas Hammer on his Edition of Shakespeare.

Source: Language, Truth, and Logic (1936), Ch. 1, first lines.
Context: The traditional disputes of philosophers are, for the most part, as unwarranted as they are unfruitful. The surest way to end them is to establish beyond question what should be the purpose and method of a philosophical enquiry. And this is by no means so difficult a task as the history of philosophy would lead one to suppose. For if there are any questions which science leaves it to philosophy to answer, a straightforward process of elimination must lead to their discovery.

§ 9
Daybreak — Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality (1881)
Context: Who is the most moral man? First, he who obeys the law most frequently, who … is continually inventive in creating opportunities for obeying the law. Then, he who obeys it even in the most difficult cases. The most moral man is he who sacrifices the most to custom. … Self-overcoming is demanded, not on account of any useful consequences it may have for the individual, but so that hegemony of custom and tradition shall be made evident.