"The objective world of science has nothing in common with the world of things-in-themselves of the metaphysician. The metaphysical world, assuming that it has any meaning at all, is irrelevant to science." (A. D'Abro, "The Evolution of Scientific Thought from Newton to Einstein", 1927)
"If the mathematician doubts the validity of an argument which proves the convergence of an infinite series satisfying a given criterion, he constructs a series which obeys the criterion but does not converge. Such tests are conclusive, and have shown up the inaccuracy of some trains of reasoning which were at first sight very convincing. The same method can be applied in metaphysics." (John B S Haldane, "Possible Worlds and Other Essays", 1928)
"Metaphysics may be, after all, only the art of being sure of something that is not so and logic only the art of going wrong with confidence." (Joseph W Krutch, "The Modern Temper", 1929)
"A precise language awaits a completed metaphysics." (Alfred North Whitehead, "Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology", 1929)
"The progress of human thought is through metaphysics to physics." (A. Gowans Whyte, "The Triumph of Physics", The Rationalist Annual, 1931)
"One has to recognize that science is not metaphysics, and certainly not mysticism; it can never bring us the illumination and the satisfaction experienced by one enraptured in ecstasy. Science is sobriety and clarity of conception, not intoxicated vision."(Ludwig Von Mises, "Epistemological Problems of Economics", 1933)
"To create a healthy philosophy you should renounce metaphysics but be a good mathematician." (Bertrand Russell, [lecture] 1935)
"In every writer on philosophy there is a concealed metaphysic, usually unconscious; even if his subject is metaphysics, he is almost certain to have an uncritically believed system which underlies his specific arguments." (Bertrand Russell, "Dewey’s New Logic" [in "The Philosophy of John Dewey", ed. by Paul A Schilpp & Lewis E Hahn, 1939])
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