“The objects of instruction in purely scientific mechanics and physics are, first, to produce in the student that improvement of the understanding which results from the cultivation of natural knowledge, and that elevation of mind which flows from the contemplation of the order of the universe”

"Quotes", Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957), Polemical Introduction

Source: Nationalism and Culture (1937), Ch. 1 "The Insufficiency of Economic Materialism"
Context: However fully man may recognise cosmic laws he will never be able to change them, because they are not his work. But every form of his social existence, every social institution which the past has bestowed on him as a legacy from remote ancestors, is the work of men and can be changed by human will and action or made to serve new ends. Only such an understanding is truly revolutionary and animated by the spirit of the coming ages. Whoever believes in the necessary sequence of all historical events sacrifices the future to the past. He explains the phenomena of social life, but he does not change them. In this respect all fatalism is alike, whether of a religious, political or economic nature. Whoever is caught in its snare is robbed thereby of life's most precious possession; the impulse to act according to his own needs. It is especially dangerous when fatalism appears in the gown of science, which nowadays so often replaces the cassock of the theologian; therefore we repeat: The causes which underlie the processes of social life have nothing in common with the laws of physical and mechanical natural events, for they are purely the results of human purpose, which is not explicable by scientific methods. To misinterpret this fact is a fatal self-deception from which only a confused notion of reality can result.

Source: Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), p. 321
Context: Let us look at the inventive class of minds which stand out amongst their fellows—the men who, with little prompting or none, conceive new ideas in science, arts, morals—and we can be at no loss to understand how and whence have arisen the elements of that civilization which history traces from country to country throughout the course of centuries. See a Pascal, reproducing the Alexandrian's problems at fifteen; a Ferguson, making clocks from the suggestions of his own brain, while tending cattle on a Morayshire heath; a boy Lawrence, in an inn on the Bath road, producing, without a master, drawings which the educated could not but admire; or look at Solon and Confucius, devising sage laws, and breathing the accents of all but divine wisdom for their barbarous fellow-countrymen, three thousand years ago—and the whole mystery is solved at once.... Nations, improved by these means, become in turn foci for the diffusion of light over the adjacent regions of barbarism—their very passions helping to this end, for nothing can be more clear than that ambitious aggression has led to the civilization of many countries. Such is the process which seems to form the destined means for bringing mankind from the darkness of barbarism to the day of knowledge and mechanical and social improvement.

In a letter to Camoin, Autumn 1914; as quoted in Matisse on Art, Jack Flam, University of California Press 1995 p. 275, note 5
1910s

Feeling and Form, ch. 1, Scribner (1953)

Robert Fludd, cited in: Arthur Edward Waite (1887). The Real History of the Rosicrucians Founded on Their Own Manifestoes https://archive.org/stream/realhistoryofros00waituoft#page/290/mode/1up. p. 290
Waite commented: "Like others of his school, Fludd insists on the uncertainty of a posteriori and experimental methods, to which he unhesitatingly attributes all the errors of the natural sciences..."

Source: Autobiography (1873)
Source: https://archive.org/details/autobiography01mill/page/186/mode/1up p. 186

Equinoctial Regions of America (1814-1829)

Variant translation: We conclude that God is known first through Nature, and then again, more particularly, by doctrine; by Nature in His works, and by doctrine in His revealed word.
Book I, Chapter XVIII.—Notwithstanding Their Conceits, the God of the Marcionites Fails in the Vouchers Both of Created Evidence and of Adequate Revelation.
This was quoted by Galileo in his defense of natural sciences.
Galileo Galilei: Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina of Tuscany, 1615 https://people.bu.edu/dklepper/RN242/duchess.html
Against Marcion https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0312.htm
Original: (la) Digna enim deo probabunt deum. Nos definimus deum primo natura cognoscendum, deinde doctrina recognoscendum, natura ex operibus, doctrina ex praedicationibus.