"Scientific method" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... certain limits. What makes the thing a success, so far as it goes, and what prevents it going further? Then, by carefully considering the nature of the affirmative factor, we see what sort of conditions to provide to enable it to express itself more fully. This is the scientific method; it has proved itself true in respect of material things, and there is no reason why it should not be equally reliable in ...
— The Dore Lectures on Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... in the formal side of poetry and projected a work on a scientific basis. It was natural that one who had so much reverence for science and who had studied the "physics of music", should apply the scientific method to the study of poetry. He knew that the science of versification was not the most important phase of poetry: in the preface, as in the epilogue, to the "Science of English Verse", he makes clear that "for the artist in verse there is no law: the ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... confined to a few great wars and movements in national life and to the important events in the lives of a few important people. The common man has never starred his role in it. Therefore, it has never been written according to the scientific method. It is simply the spray—the big splash—humanity throws up as it goes down in the sea forever. It is what most of us do and what we think perishes with us, leaving not a record behind of the little daily deeds and wingflappings ...
— A Circuit Rider's Wife • Corra Harris
... all, there is the simple and beautiful statement, "Beloved, now are we the children of God"; most of us would quote it freely; but our scientific method would at least require that we should harmonise the supposed fact with the asserted consequences, "Therefore the world knoweth us not, even as it knew Him not"; and if we find that the world smiles on us in a way that ...
— Memoranda Sacra • J. Rendel Harris
... alone. It is the oldest of the sciences, and would still survive, even if all the rest were swallowed up in the abyss of an all-destroying barbarism. But it has not yet had the good fortune to attain to the sure scientific method. This will be apparent; if we apply the tests which we proposed at the outset. We find that reason perpetually comes to a stand, when it attempts to gain a priori the perception even of those laws which the most common experience confirms. We find it compelled to retrace ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... wind was ever in his teeth. It was only by taking a course that was a constant series of zigzags, it was only by perpetually tacking, that he could ever hope to come into harbour. He was not, therefore, the less acutely aware of his precise course. He was merely adopting the most strictly scientific method of navigation. The fluctuating judgments which Flaubert seems to pronounce on the aim of the artist all represent sound approximations to a complete truth which no formula will hold. No sailor on this sea ever sailed more ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... Testament thus (in speaking of wisdom), "She is more precious than rubies." It is obviously necessary to keep and to use all such terms as have been for years established in usage, even though they do not agree with the scientific method of naming the particular mineral. It is, however, necessary that any name, thus retained, should be correctly used, and that it should not be applied to more than one material. Thus the term ruby should be reserved exclusively for red corundum, and not applied ...
— A Text-Book of Precious Stones for Jewelers and the Gem-Loving Public • Frank Bertram Wade
... with muzzle-loading 'roers,' or elephant guns, despite their desperate valour, had worsted them, with fearful slaughter. But they did not advance bodies of men to this point or to that, according to the scientific method; they drew their ox waggons into a square, lashing them together with 'reims' or hide-ropes, and from behind this rough defence, with but trifling loss to themselves, rolled back charge after charge of ...
— The True Story Book • Andrew Lang
... which is determined without determining." To students of architecture, who know equally little about pantheism and about Thomism,—or, indeed, for that matter, about architecture, too,—the quality that rouses most surprise in Thomism is its astonishingly scientific method. The Franciscans and the Jesuits call it pantheism, but science, too, is pantheism, or has till very recently been wholly pantheistic. Avowedly science has aimed at nothing but the reduction of multiplicity to unity, and has excommunicated, as though ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... of the specialist upon literature is that the amateur, hustled from any region where the historical and scientific method can be applied, turns his attention to the field of pure imagination, where he cannot be interfered with. And this, I believe, is one of the reasons why belles-lettres in the more precise sense tend to be deserted in favour of fiction. Sympathetic and imaginative criticism is ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... from enemies and giving her a share of their game. But from this admitted fact to the inference that it is "affection" that makes the husband defend his wife, there is a tremendous logical skip not warranted by the situation. Instead of making such an assumption offhand, the scientific method requires us to ask if there is not some other way of accounting for the facts more in accordance with the selfish disposition and habits of savages. The solution of the problem is easily found. A savage's wife is his property, which he has acquired by barter, ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... field science and scientific method now emphasize the pivotal importance of Birth Control. The Binet-Simon intelligence tests which have been developed, expanded, and applied to large groups of children and adults present positive statistical data ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... general position, and it would have been a benefit to us if Mr. Max Muller had stated it in his own luminous way, if he wished to oppose us, and had shown us where and how it fails to meet the requirements of scientific method. In place of doing this once for all, he often assails our evidence, yet never notices the defences of our evidence, which our school has been offering for over a hundred years. He attacks the excesses ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang
... mansions, into Western Asia, at a period not much later than 1100 B.C., and was then adopted by some Western people, either Semitic or Iranian. In their hands it was supposed to have received a new form, such as adapted it to a ruder and less scientific method of observation, the limiting stars of the mansions being converted into zodiacal groups or constellations, and in some instances altered in position, so as to be brought nearer to the general planetary path of the ecliptic. In this changed form, having become a means ...
— India: What can it teach us? - A Course of Lectures Delivered before the University Of Cambridge • F. Max Mueller
... days twenty hours forty-eight minutes fifty-three seconds, with an irregularity amounting to a few seconds in a year. The Arabs named the star Algol, or the Demon, on account of its eccentricity which did not escape their attention; and when Goodricke, in 1782, applied a scientific method of observation to it, the real cause of its variations was suggested by him, but his explanation failed of general acceptance until its truth was established by Prof. E. C. Pickering in 1880. This explanation gives ...
— Pleasures of the telescope • Garrett Serviss
... "For the true scientific method is this: To trust no statements without verification, to test all things as rigorously as possible, to keep no secrets, to attempt no monopolies, to give out one's best modestly and plainly, serving no ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... arrangements. The educational views of faculty members greatly need to be steadied, ordered, and appreciably broadened and deepened by a developed and trained habit of thinking educationally under the safeguards of scientific method and on the basis of an adequate supply of facts. That pedagogy has made but the smallest beginning of gathering and ordering such facts and developing a scientific method in this field is not a valid objection. ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... debutante or dandy should ever dream of going out to dine. Not that Mr. Mahaffy's book can be said to be, in any sense of the word, popular. In discussing this important subject of conversation, he has not merely followed the scientific method of Aristotle which is, perhaps, excusable, but he has adopted the literary style of Aristotle for which no excuse is possible. There is, also, hardly a single anecdote, hardly a single illustration, ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... movement towards greater social equality, depending for its force upon three main factors, the growing political power of the working classes, the growing social sympathy of many members of all classes, and the belief, based on the growing authority of scientific method, that social arrangements can be transformed by means of conscious and deliberate contrivance.' He would see men trying to forward this movement by proposals as to taxation, wages, and regulative or collective administration; some of which proposals would prove to be successfully adapted to ...
— Human Nature In Politics - Third Edition • Graham Wallas
... or practising in the name of Truth, but con- trary to its spirit or rules, is most dangerous quackery. Strict adherence to the divine Principle and 456:6 rules of the scientific method has secured the only success of the students of Christian Science. This alone entitles them to the high standing which 456:9 most of them hold in the community, a reputation ex- perimentally justified by their ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... have a duty to perform from which I ought not to shrink. Some of those who have honored me with their presence to-night may recollect that about a year ago a lecture was delivered in this very room by Professor Blackie, in which he tried to throw discredit on the scientific method of the interpretation of popular myths, or on what I call Comparative Mythology. Had he confined his remarks to the subject itself, I should have felt most grateful for his criticisms, little minding the ...
— Chips From A German Workshop, Vol. V. • F. Max Mueller
... are now going to develop, or perpetrate, is rather intensely of the accursed, or the advanced. It's a lost soul, I admit—or boast—but it fits in. Or, as conventional as ever, our own method is the scientific method of assimilating. It assimilates, if we think ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... machines were called, and unusual appliances. The working of the pits was thoroughly changed, all the control was taken out of the hands of the miners, the butty system was abolished. Everything was run on the most accurate and delicate scientific method, educated and expert men were in control everywhere, the miners were reduced to mere mechanical instruments. They had to work hard, much harder than before, the work was terrible and heart-breaking ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... said he, "it must depend upon some bizarre and rare combination of events, so we need have no hesitation in postulating such events in our explanation. In the absence of data we must abandon the analytic or scientific method of investigation, and must approach it in the synthetic fashion. In a word, instead of taking known events and deducing from them what has occurred, we must build up a fanciful explanation if it ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... But such being the object in view, it is necessary to eliminate as far as possible all other perceptions, to arrest those two, and so to polarize attention on them that all other images shall be obscured in the field of consciousness. This would be the scientific method tending to isolate perceptions; and it is in fact the practical method adopted by us in our education of the senses. In the case of cold and heat, the child is "prepared" by the isolation of the particular sense in ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... growl as they like. They will growl if they notice it at all: for each will want his own theory favored, and the only thing I have conscientiously aimed at is not to favor any theory at all." She may have failed in scientific method; but here is a scientific spirit. "In her religious speculations," says Whittier, "Mrs. Child moved in the very van." In Wayland, she considered herself a parishioner of Dr. Edmund H. Sears, whom she calls, "our minister," but she was somewhat in advance of Dr. Sears. Her opinions were much ...
— Daughters of the Puritans - A Group of Brief Biographies • Seth Curtis Beach
... scientific method avails nothing against moral proofs of the fact. The physiologist studying the coats of the stomach, the anatomist dissecting the convolutions of the brain, could never tell that man is capable of sentiment, faith, and ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... expound religion and if we give that up we give up our place in a learned profession. Moreover, the new conditions of the modern world make doctrine imperative. That world is distinguished by its free inquiry, its cultivation of the scientific method, its abandonment of obscuranticisms and ambiguities. It demands, then, devout and holy thinking from us. Who would deny that the revival of intellectual authority and leadership in matters of religion is terribly needed in our day? Sabatier is right in saying that a religion without doctrine is ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... It is the everlasting and miraculous amazement. Oh, trust me, I know the old, hard scientific method of weighing and calculating and classifying love. It is a profound foolishness, a cosmic trick and quip, to the contemplative eye of the philosopher—yes, and of the futurist. But when one forsakes such intellectual flesh-pots and becomes mere human and male human, in short, a lover, ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... weak answer to say that no one can tell how much time will be occupied in the trial of a case. If any systematic or scientific method of regulating the calendar were devised, one of the evils ...
— The Man in Court • Frederic DeWitt Wells
... man created a rational being?) and so it is; and the requirements of the more educated are becoming so peremptory, that many thinking men would be ready to say (I should be sorry to endorse their opinion), that if History is not studied according to exact scientific method, it need not ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... when it is more closely examined, is seen to assign the ground on which this work is held to lack the requisite scientific character. The indictment says: "While the defendant, Lassalle, has been at pains to give himself the appearance of scientific method in this address, still the address is after all ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... the nature of the only radical cure, known to me, for the disease which would thus threaten the existence of the colony; and, however regretfully, I have been obliged to admit that this rigorously scientific method of applying the principles of evolution to human society hardly comes within the region of practical politics; not for want of will on the part of a great many people; but because, for one reason, ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... a pair of particularly stubborn mules to haul his boat, and it occurred to him that he might devise some scientific method of inducing the said mules to move whenever they were inclined to be baulky. Both mules had phlegmatic temperaments; and when they made up their minds to stop, they would do so and refuse to go, no matter ...
— Elbow-Room - A Novel Without a Plot • Charles Heber Clark (AKA Max Adeler)
... such deliberate selective acts, in respect to the smaller matters of life. You willingly spend time and money over that narrowing and sharpening of attention which you call a "business training," a "legal education," the "acquirement of a scientific method." But this new undertaking will involve the development and the training of a layer of your consciousness which has lain fallow in the past; the acquirement of a method you have never used before. It is reasonable, even reassuring, that hard work and discipline should be needed ...
— Practical Mysticism - A Little Book for Normal People • Evelyn Underhill
... have already referred to the turning of the minds of the Greeks from the power of the gods to {459} a look into nature's processes. We have seen how they lacked a scientific method and also scientific data sufficient to verify their assumptions. We have observed how, while they took a great step forward, their conclusions were lost in the Dark Ages and in the early mediaeval period, and how they were brought to light in the later ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... will now arrive at the same result by a shorter and more scientific method. This method consists in first determining what pairs of premisses are valid in accordance with Rules 6 and g, and then examining what conclusions may be legitimately inferred from them in accordance with the other rules ...
— Deductive Logic • St. George Stock
... spiritual developments, such as that of Christianity, or other worlds of religious conceptions. Any one applying these methods may arouse the opposition of many who believe they are thinking scientifically, but he will know himself, for all that, to be in full accord with a genuinely scientific method ...
— Christianity As A Mystical Fact - And The Mysteries of Antiquity • Rudolf Steiner
... I am, it is my intention to demonstrate that Marxian Socialism—the only socialism which has a truly scientific method and value, and therefore the only socialism which from this time forth has power to inspire and unite the Social Democrats throughout the civilized world—is only the practical and fruitful fulfilment, in the social life, of that modern scientific ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri |
