Over Against Any Cognition, There Is An

To Suppose Universal Laws Of Nature Capable Of Being Apprehended By The Mind And Yet Having No Reason For Their Special Forms, But Standing Inexplicable And Irrational, Is Hardly A Justifiable Position. Uniformities Are Precisely The Sort Of Facts That Need To Be Accounted For. Law Is Par Excellence The Thing That Wants A Reason. Now The Only Possible Way Of Accounting For The Laws Of Nature, And For Uniformity In General, Is To Suppose Them Results Of Evolution.

It Is Terrible To See How A Single Unclear Idea, A Single Formula Without Meaning, Lurking In A Young Man's Head, Will Sometimes Act Like An Obstruction Of Inert Matter In An Artery, Hindering The Nutrition Of The Brain And Condemning Its Victim To Pine Away In The Fullness Of His Intellectual Vigor And In The Midst Of Intellectual Plenty.

Our Whole Past Experience Is Continually In Our Consciousness, Though Most Of It Sunk To A Great Depth Of Dimness. I Think Of Consciousness As A Bottomless Lake, Whose Waters Seem Transparent, Yet Into Which We Can Clearly See But A Little Way.

The Opinion Which Is Fated To Be Ultimately Agreed To By All Who Investigate, Is What We Mean By The Truth, And The Object Represented In This Opinion Is The Real. That Is The Way I Would Explain Reality.

If We Are To Define Science, ... It Does Not Consist So Much In Knowing, Nor Even In "organized Knowledge," As It Does In Diligent Inquiry Into Truth For Truth's Sake, Without Any Sort Of Axe To Grind, Nor For The Sake Of The Delight Of Contemplating It, But From An Impulse To Penetrate Into The Reason Of Things.