Bernard de Fontenelle - Collected Quotes

"Grant a mathematician but one minute principle, he immediately draws a consequence from it, to which you must necessarily assent; and from this consequence another, till he leads you so far (whether you will or no) that you have much ado to believe all he has proved, and what you have already assented to." (Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle, "Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds", 1686)

"The universe is but a watch on a larger scale; all its motions depending on determined laws and mutual relation of its parts." (Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle, "Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds", 1686)

"We are under obligation to the ancients for having exhausted all the false theories that could be formed." (Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle, "Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds", 1686)

"We do not yet pretend to have discovered all things, or that what we have discovered can receive no addition; and therefore, pray let us agree, there are yet many things to be done in the ages to come." (Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle, "Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds", 1686)

"Nothing proves more clearly that the mind seeks truth, and nothing reflects more glory upon it, than the delight it takes, sometimes in spite of itself, in the driest and thorniest researches of algebra." (Bernard de Fontenelle, "Histoire du Renouvellement de l'Académie des Sciences", 1708)

"From this it follows that the idea of positive or negative is added to those magnitudes which are contrary in some way. […] All contrariness or opposition suffices for the idea of positive or negative. […] Thus every positive or negative magnitude does not have just its numerical being, by which it is a certain number, a certain quantity, but has in addition its specific being, by which it is a certain Thing opposite to another. I say opposite to another, because it is only by this opposition that it attains a specific being (Bernard le Bouyer de Fontenelle, "Éléments de la géométrie de l'Infini", 1727)

"The calculus is to mathematics no more than what experiment is to physics, and all the truths produced solely by the calculus can be treated as truths of experiment." (Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle)

"There is in mathematics, so to speak, only what we have placed there, only the clearest ideas that the human mind can form of magnitude, compared with one another and combined in an infinity of different ways, while Nature could well have used in the construction of the universe some mechanics that escapes us entirely." (Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle)