“Experiment is the mother of knowledge.”

Source: A Wrinkle in Time: With Related Readings

Last update June 3, 2021. History

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Madeleine L'Engle photo
Madeleine L'Engle 223
American writer 1918–2007

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“Information is not knowledge. The only source of knowledge is experience.”

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According to Barbara Wolff, of The Hebrew University's Albert Einstein Archives, this is not one of Einstein's identifiable quotations. (Source: paralegalpie.com http://www.paralegalpie.com/paralegalpie/2009/11/did-anybody-really-say-that.html.)
The phrase "the only source of knowledge is experience" is found in an English-language essay from 1896: "We can only be guided by what we know, and our only source of knowledge is experience" (Arthur J. Pillsbury, "The Final Word" https://books.google.com/books?id=Mw9IAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA595&dq=%22only+source", Overland Monthly, November 1896). The thought can be seen as a paraphrase of John Locke's argument from his Essay Concerning Human Understanding: "Whence has it [the Mind] all the materials of Reason and Knowledge? To this I answer, in one Word, From Experience". (Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding/Book II/Chapter I, 2.)
The phrase "information is not knowledge" is also found from the nineteenth century https://books.google.com/books?id=W2oAAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA59&dq=%22information+is+not+knowledge%22.
Misattributed

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“The true method of knowledge is experiment.”

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"Critique of the Physical Concepts of the Corpuscular Theory" in The Physical Principles of the Quantum Theory (1930) as translated by Carl Eckhart and Frank C. Hoyt, p. 20; also in "The Uncertainty Principle" in The World of Mathematics : A Small Library of the Literature of Mathematics (1956) by James Roy Newman, p. 1051

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“In democratic countries knowledge of how to combine is the mother of all other forms of knowledge; on its progress depends that of all the others.”

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“The highest knowledge man can possess is that which is true in his own experience. If his experience is limited, so is his knowledge and he behaves accordingly.”

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Context: You think: you become that thought. And consciousness, or the state of pure awareness, is lost. The highest knowledge man can possess is that which is true in his own experience. If his experience is limited, so is his knowledge and he behaves accordingly.

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“All our knowledge falls with the bounds of experience.”

A 146, B 185
Critique of Pure Reason (1781; 1787)

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