
“Science … commits suicide when it adopts a creed.”
"The Darwin Memorial" (1885) http://aleph0.clarku.edu/huxley/CE2/DarM.html
1880s
Source: The Outsider (1956), Chapter Nine, Breaking the Circuit
“Science … commits suicide when it adopts a creed.”
"The Darwin Memorial" (1885) http://aleph0.clarku.edu/huxley/CE2/DarM.html
1880s
From Lettre à Maurice Solvine, by A. Einstein (Gauthier-Villars: Paris 1956)
Attributed in posthumous publications, Albert Einstein: A guide for the perplexed (1979)
Source: 1940s and later, Otto Neurath Economic Writings. Selections 1904-1945 (2004), p. 269
The Ageless Wisdom, An Introduction to Humanity's Spiritual Legacy (1996)
"On Cloning a Human Being", p. 52
The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher (1979)
Source: Don't Start the Revolution Without Me! (2008), Ch. 10 (p. 186)
Context: Another of the religious right's scams is marching into public school science classes and trying to mandate teaching of "creation science," as opposed to evolution. Somehow, they put evolutionism and creationism in the same category—believing that one makes the other impossible. But aren't these two separate systems of knowledge? One is a scientific theory, the other is a religious doctrine. It's kind of like comparing the law of gravity to the Sermon on the Mount. Evolution doesn't pretend to disprove the Bible's version of creation, or the belief in an all-powerful being as "prime mover" of the universe. Science only deals with what's observable, definable, and measurable. It's open to all possibilities, unlike creationism, which is a closed book. So leave evolution to the science teachers, and creation to the Sunday school of the parents' choosing.
An Outline of Philosophy Ch.15 The Nature of our Knowledge of Physics (1927)
1920s
Context: Physics is mathematical not because we know so much about the physical world, but because we know so little: it is only its mathematical properties that we can discover.
Source: Ex-Prodigy: My Childhood and Youth (1964), p. 89; partly cited in: Herman E. Daly. Steady-State Economics: Second Edition With New Essays. 1977/1991 p. 4
§ 2.
Linear Associative Algebra (1882)
Context: The branches of mathematics are as various as the sciences to which they belong, and each subject of physical enquiry has its appropriate mathematics. In every form of material manifestation, there is a corresponding form of human thought, so that the human mind is as wide in its range of thought as the physical universe in which it thinks.