John W N Sullivan - Collected Quotes

"Knowledge for the sake of knowledge, as the history of science proves, is an aim with an irresistible fascination for mankind, and which needs no defense. The mere fact that science does, to a great extent, gratify our intellectual curiosity, is a sufficient reason for its existence." (John W N Sullivan, "The Limitations of Science", 1915)

"[…] science deals with but a partial aspect of reality, and there is no faintest reason for supposing that everything science ignores is less real than what it accepts. [...] Why is it that science forms a closed system? Why is it that the elements of reality it ignores never come in to disturb it? The reason is that all the terms of physics are defined in terms of one another. The abstractions with which physics begins are all it ever has to do with." (John W N Sullivan, "The Limitations of Science", 1915)

"Science deals with but a partial aspect of reality, and […] there is no faintest reason for supposing that everything science ignores is less real than what it accepts. […] Why is it that science forms a closed system? Why is is that the elements of reality it ignores never come in to disturb it? The reason is that all the terms of physics are defined in terms of one another. The abstractions with which physics begins are all it ever has to do with […]" (John W N Sullivan, "The Limitations of Science", 1915)

"Science, like everything else that man has created, exists, of course, to gratify certain human needs and desires. The fact that it has been steadily pursued for so many centuries, that it has attracted an ever-wider extent of attention, and that it is now the dominant intellectual interest of mankind, shows that it appeals to a very powerful and persistent group of appetites." (John W N Sullivan, "The Limitations of Science", 1915)

"Since the primary object of the scientific theory is to express the harmonies which are found to exist in nature, we see at once that these theories must have an aesthetic value. The measure of the success of a scientific theory is, in fact, a measure of its aesthetic value, since it is a measure of the extent to which it has introduced harmony in what was before chaos." (John W N Sullivan, "The Justification of the Scientific Method", The Athenaeum (4644), 1919)

"The measure in which science falls short of art is the measure in which it is incomplete as science." (John W N Sullivan, "The Justification of the Scientific Method", The Athenaeum, 1919)

"Mathematics, as much as music or any other art, is one of the means by which we rise to a complete self-consciousness. The significance of mathematics resides precisely in the fact that it is an art; by informing us of the nature of our own minds it informs us of much that depends on our minds. It does not enable us to explore some remote region of the eternally existent; it helps to show us how far what exists depends upon the way in which we exist. We are the law-givers of the universe; it is even possible that we can experience nothing but what we have created, and that the greatest of our mathematical creations is the material universe itself." (John W N Sullivan, "Aspects of Science", 1923) 

"[...] mathematics is an entirely free activity, unconditioned by the external world, it is more just to call it an art than a science. It is as independent as music of the external world; and although, unlike music, it can be used to illuminate natural phenomena, it is just as 'subjective', just as much a product of the free creative imagination. And it is not at all difficult to discover that the mathematicians are impelled by the same incentives and experience the same satisfactions as other artists." (John W N Sullivan, "Aspects of Science", 1923) 

"The mathematician is free in his imagination, to construct what worlds he pleases. What he is to imagine is a matter for his own caprice; he is not thereby discovering the fundamental principles of the universe nor becoming acquainted with the ideas of God. If he can find, in experience, sets of entities which obey the same logical scheme as his mathematical entities, then he has applied his mathematics to the external world; he has created a branch of science." (John W N Sullivan, "Aspects of Science", 1923)

"[…] a history of mathematics is largely a history of discoveries which no longer exist as separate items, but are merged into some more modern generalization, these discoveries have not been forgotten or made valueless. They are not dead, but transmuted." (John W N Sullivan, "The History of Mathematics in Europe", 1925)

"The electron is not, for example, an enduring something that can be tracked through time. Its mathematical description does not involve that degree of definiteness. Any picture we form of the atom errs, as it were, by excess of solidity. The mathematical symbols refer to entities more indefinite than our pictorial imagination, limited as it is by experience of 'gross matter', can construct." (John W N Sullivan, "The Bases of Modern Science", 1929)

"The present tendency of physics is toward describing the universe in terms of mathematical relations between unimaginable entities." (John W N Sullivan, "The Bases of Modern Science", 1929)

"Science, indeed, tells us a very great deal less about the universe than we have been accustomed to suppose, and there is no reason to believe that all we can ever know must be couched in terms of its thin and largely arbitrary abstractions."  (John W N Sullivan, "Art and Reality", 1964)

"The mathematician is entirely free, within the limits of his imagination, to construct what worlds he pleases. What he is to imagine is a matter for his own caprice; he is not thereby discovering the fundamental principles of the universe nor becoming acquainted with the ideas of God." (John W N Sullivan)