“To a person whose experience has never been brought into relation with the object sulphur, the name signifies nothing; to the scientist… his concept involves the ideas of specific gravity, crystalline form, element, atom, and the like, derived from past experiences. His concept is distinguished from the other by involving… number or quantity.”

—  J. R. Partington

Introduction
Higher Mathematics for Chemical Students (1911)

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 "To a person whose experience has never been brought into relation with the object sulphur, the name signifies nothing; …" by J. R. Partington?
J. R. Partington photo
J. R. Partington 38
British chemist 1886–1965

Related quotes

György Lukács photo

“The function of these unmediated concepts that have been derived from the fetishistic forms of objectivity is to make the phenomena of capitalist society appear as supra-rational historical essences.”

György Lukács book History and Class Consciousness

Source: History and Class Consciousness (1968), p. 14

Bernhard Riemann photo

“Kant has rightly observed that by the resolution of the concept of a thing we can find neither that it exists nor that it is the cause of something else, and accordingly that the concepts of being and causality are not analytical but can be derived only from experience. When however he later feels himself obliged to assume that the notion of causality originates in a pre-experiential property of the cognising subject and therefore stamps it a mere rule of time-series, by which, in experience, with each observation as cause any other could be connected as effect, then is the child thrown out with the bath. (Indeed, we must derive the relations of causality from experience; but we must not fail to correct and to complete our conception of these facts of experience by reflection.)”

Bernhard Riemann (1826–1866) German mathematician

Causality, p. 214
Gesammelte Mathematische Werke (1876)

John Maxson Stillman photo

“Boyle entertains the hypothesis of a universal matter, the concept of atoms of different shapes and sizes, and the possibility of existence of substances that might properly be called elements… The atomic theory as originally conceived by Democritus and Epicurus, developed by Lucretius, and resurrected by Gassendi from about 1647 on, was doubtless the source from which Boyle derived his ideas, …as he cites both Epicurus and Gassendi. Boyle, however… avoids any dogmatic assertion of these hypotheses. It is plain, however, that these atoms or "corpuscles" as he calls them are a constant element of his thought.”

John Maxson Stillman (1852–1923) American chemist

John Maxson Stillman, The Story of Alchemy and Early Chemistry (1924)

“The word experiment derives from 'experimentum' - that which has been experienced and what, for the writer, has been experienced is the work of his great predecessors”

Vernon Scannell (1922–2007) British boxer and poet

A Proper Gentleman, 1977

“The concept of the infinitely small is involved in the relation of points to a line or the relation of the discrete to the continuous, and Zeno's paradoxes may have caused the Greeks to shy away from this subject.”

Morris Kline (1908–1992) American mathematician

Source: Mathematical Thought from Ancient to Modern Times (1972), p. 175

Muhammad Iqbál photo

“The immediacy of mystic experience simply means that we know God just as we know other objects. God is not a mathematical entity or a system of concepts mutually related to one another and having no reference to experience.”

Muhammad Iqbál (1877–1938) Urdu poet and leader of the Pakistan Movement

Source: The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Reconstruction_of_Religious_Thought/uCh14nl09jkC?hl=en (1930), p. 14

Richard Leakey photo

“A vital leap in the evolution of intellectual capacity would have been the ability to form concepts, to conceive of individual objects as belonging to distinct classes, and thus do away with the almost intolerable burden of relating one experience to another. Concepts, moreover, can be manipulated and this is the root of abstract thought and of invention. The formation of concepts is also a necessary, but apparently not sufficient, condition for the emergence of language.”

Richard Leakey (1944) Kenyan paleoanthropologist, conservationist, and politician

Origins (1977)

“In similar fashion we may approach the personality and induce the individual to reveal his way of organizing experience by giving him a field (objects, materials, experiences) with relatively little structure and cultural patterning so that the personality can project upon that plastic field his way of seeing life, his meanings, significances, patterns, and especially his feelings, Thus we elicit a projection of the individual's private world, because he has to organize the field, interpret the material, and react affectively to it. More specifically, a projection method for study of personality involves the presentation of a stimulus-situation designed or chosen because it will mean to the subject, not what the experimenter has arbitrarily decided it should mean (as in most psychological experiments using standardized stimuli in order to be “objective”), but rather whatever it must mean to the personality who gives it, or imposes it, his private, idiosyncratic meaning and organization. The subject then will respond to his meaning of the presented stimulus-situation by some form of action and feeling that is expressive of his personality.”

Lawrence K. Frank (1890–1968) American cyberneticist

Source: Projective methods for the study of personality (1939), p. 402-403; As cited in: Edwin Inglee Megargee, Charles Donald Spielberger (1992) Personality assessment in America: a retrospective on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the Society for Personality Assessment. p. 20-21

“It is clear, however, that the distinguishing mark of the whole development of theoretical chemistry and physics is the elimination of the anthropomorphic elements, especially specific sense-impressions, from the concepts. This process is called by Prof. M. Planck the objectification of the physical system.”

J. R. Partington (1886–1965) British chemist

Introduction Note: Max Planck, "Acht Vorlesungen iiber theoretische Physik" (1910)
Higher Mathematics for Chemical Students (1911)

John R. Commons photo

“Economic theory deals with two concepts, Value and Economy. Abstract reasoning regarding these concepts rests ultimately on mathematical concepts of quantity, time and energy. The three are inseparable, for quantity and time are dimensions of energy. The quantity relationships of energy, usually termed "statics," turn on the problem of the relation of the parts to the whole, while the time relationships, usually termed "dynamics," are the relations of a process that connects past, present and future.”

John R. Commons (1862–1945) United States institutional economist and labor historian

Source: Legal foundations of capitalism. 1924, p. 1; Lead paragraph first chapter on Mechanism, Scarcity, Working Rules

Related topics