"Philosophers conceive of the passions which harass us as vices into which men fall by their own fault, and, therefore, generally deride, bewail, or blame them, or execrate them, if they wish to seem unusually pious. And so they think they are doing something wonderful, and reaching the pinnacle of learning, when they are clever enough to bestow manifold praise on such human nature, as is nowhere to be found, and to make verbal attacks on that which, in fact, exists. For they conceive of men, not as they are, but as they themselves would like them to be. Whence it has come to pass that, instead of ethics, they have generally written satire, and that they have never conceived a theory of politics, which could be turned to use, but such as might be taken for a chimera, or might have been formed in Utopia, or in that golden age of the poets when, to be sure, there was least need of it. Accordingly, as in all sciences, which have a useful application, so especially in that of politics, theory is supposed to be at variance with practice; and no men are esteemed less fit to direct public affairs than theorists or philosophers." (Baruch Spinoza, "Political Treatise", 1677)
"All true metaphysics is taken from the essential nature of the thinking faculty itself, and therefore in nowise invented, since it is not borrowed from experience, but contains the pure operations of thought, that is, conceptions and principles à priori, which the manifold of empirical presentations first of all brings into legitimate connection, by which it can become empirical knowledge, i.e. experience. [...] mathematical physicists were thus quite unable to dispense with such metaphysical principles [...]" (Immanuel Kant, "Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science", 1786)
"It is the principle of necessity towards which, as to their ultimate centre, all the ideas advanced in this essay immediately converge. In abstract theory the limits of this necessity are determined solely by considerations of man’s proper nature as a human being; but in the application we have to regard, in addition, the individuality of man as he actually exists. This principle of necessity should, I think, prescribe the grand fundamental rule to which every effort to act on human beings and their manifold relations should be invariably conformed. For it is the only thing which conducts to certain and unquestionable results. The consideration of the useful, which might be opposed to it, does not admit of any true and unswerving decision." (Wilhelm Von Humboldt, "The Limits of State Action", 1792)
"Before abstraction everything is one, but one like chaos; after abstraction everything is united again, but this union is a free binding of autonomous, self-determined beings. Out of a mob a society has developed, chaos has been transformed into a manifold world." (G P Friedrich F von Hardenberg [Novalis], "Blüthenstaub" [Fragment No. 95], 1798)
"Nature, in the manifold signification of the word - whether considered as the universality of all that is and ever will be - as the inner moving force of all phenomena, or as their mysterious prototype - reveals itself to the simple mind and feelings of man as something earthly, and closely allied to himself. "(Alexander von Humboldt, Cosmos: "A Sketch of a Physical Description of the Universe", 1845)
"Nothing protects us so surely from this wrong turning as inner wealth, the wealth of the mind, for the more eminent it becomes, the less room does it leave for boredom. The inexhaustible activity of ideas, their constantly renewed play with the manifold phenomena of the inner and outer worlds, the power and urge always to make different combinations of them, all these put the eminent mind, apart from moments of relaxation, quite beyond the reach of boredom." (Arthur Schopenhauer, "Parerga and Paralipomena", 1851)
"Manifold subsequent experience has led to a truer appreciation and a more moderate estimate of the importance of the dependence of one living being upon another." (Richard Owen, The Edinburgh Review, 1860)
"If we consider further the manifold relations of this mathematical theory to civil uses and the technical arts, we shall recognize completely the extent of its applications. It is evident that it includes an entire series of distinct phenomena, and that the study of it cannot be omitted without losing a notable part of the science of nature.
The principles of the theory are derived, as are those of rational mechanics, from a very small number of primary facts, the causes of which are not considered by geometers, but which they admit as the results of common observations confirmed by all experiment." (Joseph Fourier, "The Analytical Theory of Heat", 1878)
"The analysis of Nature into its individual parts, the
grouping of the different natural processes and natural objects in definite
classes, the study of the internal anatomy of organic bodies in their manifold
forms—these were the fundamental conditions of the gigantic strides in our
knowledge of Nature which have been made during the last four hundred years.
But this method of investigation has also left us as a legacy the habit of
observing natural objects and natural processes in their isolation, detached
from the whole vast interconnection of things; and therefore not in their
motion, but in their repose; not as essentially changing, but fixed constants;
not in their life, but in their death." (Friedrich Engels, "Herr Eugen Dühring's
Revolution in Science", 1878)
"A philosophy which emphasises the idea of the One, is generally a dualistic philosophy in which the conception of Second receives exaggerated attention: for this One (though of course involving the idea of First) is always the other of a manifold which is not one." (Charles S Peirce, "The Architecture of Theories", 1891)
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