“Science has become too complex to affirm the existence of universal truths, but it strives for nothing else, and disputes the problem, within its own limits, almost as earnestly as in the twelfth century, when the whole field of human and superhuman activity was shut between these barriers of Substance, Universals, and Particulars. Little has changed except the vocabulary and the method.”

—  Henry Adams

Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904)

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 has become too complex to affirm the existence of universal truths, but it strives for nothing else, and disput…" by Henry Adams?
Henry Adams photo
Henry Adams 311
journalist, historian, academic, novelist 1838–1918

Related quotes

Peter L. Berger photo
Bertrand Russell photo

“I like mathematics because it is not human and has nothing particular to do with this planet or with the whole accidental universe – because, like Spinoza's God, it won't love us in return.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

Letter to Lady Ottoline Morrell, March, 1912, as quoted in Gaither's Dictionary of Scientific Quotations (2012), p. 1318
1910s

Elinor Ostrom photo
Immanuel Kant photo
Paul Davies photo
Alice A. Bailey photo
Theodor W. Adorno photo

“The invocation of science, of its ground rules, of the exclusive validity of the methods that science has now completely become, now constitutes a surveillance authority punishing free, uncoddled, undisciplined thought and tolerating nothing of mental activity other than what has been methodologically sanctioned. Science and scholarship, the medium of autonomy, has degenerated into an instrument of heteronomy.”

Theodor W. Adorno (1903–1969) German sociologist, philosopher and musicologist known for his critical theory of society

Die Berufung auf Wissenschaft, auf ihre Spielregeln, auf die Alleingültigkeit der Methoden, zu denen sie sich entwickelte, ist zur Kontrollinstanz geworden, die den freien, ungegängelten, nicht schon dressierten Gedanken ahndet und vom Geist nichts duldet als das methodologisch Approbierte. Wissenscahaft,das Medium von Autonomie, ist in einen Apparat der Heteronomie ausgeartet.
Source: Wozu noch Philosophie? [Why still philosophy?] (1963), p. 12

Karl Pearson photo
Maimónides photo
Theodor W. Adorno photo

“The melancholy science from which I make this offering to my friend relates to a region that from time immemorial was regarded as the true field of philosophy, but which, since the latter’s conversion into method, has lapsed into intellectual neglect, sententious whimsy and finally oblivion: the teaching of the good life. What the philosophers once knew as life has become the sphere of private existence and now of mere consumption, dragged along as an appendage of the process of material production, without autonomy or substance of its own.”

Die traurige Wissenschaft, aus der ich meinem Freunde einiges darbiete, bezieht sich auf einen Bereich, der für undenkliche Zeiten als der eigentliche der Philosophie galt, seit deren Verwandlung in Methode aber der intellektuellen Nichtachtung, der sententiösen Willkür und am Ende der Vergessenheit verfiel: die Lehre vom richtigen Leben. Was einmal den Philosophen Leben hieß, ist zur Sphäre des Privaten und dann bloß noch des Konsums geworden, die als Anhang des materiellen Produktionsprozesses, ohne Autonomie und ohne eigene Substanz, mit geschleift wird.
E. Jephcott, trans. (1974), Dedication
Minima Moralia (1951)

Related topics