"It is by abstraction that one can separate movements, knowledge, and affectivity. And the analysis is, here, so far from being a real dismemberment that it is given only as probable. One can never effectively reduce an [mental] image to its elements, for the reason that an image, like all other psychic syntheses, is something more and different from the sum of its elements. […] We will always go from image to image. Comprehension is a movement which is never-ending, it is the reaction of the mind to an image by another image, to this one by another image and so on, in principle to infinity. "(Jean-Paul Sartre, "The Imaginary: A phenomenological psychology of the imagination", 1940)
"A […] difference between most system-building in the social sciences and systems of thought and classification of the natural sciences is to be seen in their evolution. In the natural sciences both theories and descriptive systems grow by adaptation to the increasing knowledge and experience of the scientists. In the social sciences, systems often issue fully formed from the mind of one man. Then they may be much discussed if they attract attention, but progressive adaptive modification as a result of the concerted efforts of great numbers of men is rare." (Lawrence J Henderson, "The Study of Man", 1941)
"Mathematics as an expression of the human mind reflects the active will, the contemplative reason, and the desire for aesthetic perfection. Its basic elements are logic and intuition, analysis and construction, generality and individuality. Though different traditions may emphasize different aspects, it is only the interplay of these antithetic forces and the struggle for their synthesis that constitute the life, usefulness, and supreme value of mathematical science." (Richard Courant & Herbert Robbins, "What Is Mathematics?", 1941)
"Science is the organised attempt of mankind to discover how things work as causal systems. The scientific attitude of mind is an interest in such questions. It can be contrasted with other attitudes, which have different interests; for instance the magical, which attempts to make things work not as material systems but as immaterial forces which can be controlled by spells; or the religious, which is interested in the world as revealing the nature of God." (Conrad H Waddington, "The Scientific Attitude", 1941)
"The notion that the intellect can create meaningful postulational systems at its whim is a deceptive half-truth. Only under the discipline of responsibility to the organic whole, only guided by intrinsic necessity, can the free mind achieve results of scientific value." (Richard Courant & Herbert Robbins, "What Is Mathematics?", 1941)
"Different kinds of facts, having different degrees of scientific value, are ascertainable in these two ways. Facts ascertainable by mere observation are what are called common-sense facts, i.e. facts accessible to a commonplace mind on occasions frequent enough to be rather often perceived and of such a kind that their characteristics can be adequately perceived without trouble: so that the facts concerning them can be familiar to persons not especially gifted and not especially alert." (Robin G Collingwood, "The New Leviathan: Or Man, Society, Civilization and Barbarism", 1942)
"Physicists who are trying to understand nature may work in many different fields and by many different methods; one may dig, one may sow, one may reap. But the final harvest will always be a sheaf of mathematical formulae. These will never describe nature itself, hut only our observations on nature. Our studies can never put us into contact with reality; we can never penetrate beyond the impressions that reality implants in our minds." (James H Jeans, "Physics and Philosophy", 1942)
"[…] many philosophers have found it difficult to accept the hypothesis that an object is just about what it appears to be, and so is like the mental picture it produces in our minds. For an object and a mental picture are of entirely different natures - a brick and the mental picture of a brick can at best no more resemble one another than an orchestra and a symphony. In any case, there is no compelling reason why phenomena - the mental visions that a mind constructs out of electric currents in a brain - should resemble the objects that produced these currents in the first instance." (James H Jeans," Physics and Philosophy" 3rd Ed., 1943)
"Although we can never devise a pictorial representation which shall be both true to nature and intelligible to our minds, we may still be able to make partial aspects of the truth comprehensible through pictorial representations or parables. As the whole truth does not admit of intelligible representation, every such pictorial representation or parable must fail somewhere. The physicist of the last generation was continually making pictorial representations and parables, and also making the mistake of treating the half-truths of pictorial representations and parables as literal truths." (James H Jeans, "Physics and Philosophy" 3rd Ed., 1943)
"In time they [physicists] hoped to devise a model which would reproduce all the phenomena of physics, and so make it possible to predict them all. […] To-day we not only have no perfect model, but we know that it is of no use to search for one - it could have no intelligible meaning for us. For we have found out that nature does not function in a way that can be made comprehensible to the human mind through models or pictures. […] Although we can never devise a pictorial representation which shall be both true to nature and intelligible to our minds, we may still be able to make partial aspects of the truth comprehensible through pictorial representations or parables. As the whole truth does not admit of intelligible representation, every such pictorial representation or parable must fail somewhere. The physicist of the last generation was continually making pictorial representations and parables, and also making the mistake of treating the half-truths of pictorial representations and parables as literal truths." (James H Jeans, "Physics and Philosophy" 3rd Ed., 1943)
"My hypothesis then is that thought models, or parallels, reality - that its essential feature is not ‘the mind’, ‘the self’, ‘sense-data’, nor propositions but symbolism, and that this symbolism is largely of the same kind as that which is familiar to us in mechanical devices which aid thought and calculation." (Kenneth Craik, "The Nature of Explanation", 1943)
"The pictures we draw of nature show similar limitations; these are the price we pay for limiting our pictures of nature to the kinds that can be understood by our minds. As we cannot draw one perfect picture, we make two imperfect pictures and turn to one or the other according as we want one property or another to be accurately delineated. Our observations tell us which is the right picture to use for each particular purpose […] . Yet some properties of nature are so far-reaching and general that neither picture can depict them properly of itself. In such cases we must appeal to both pictures, and these sometimes give us different and inconsistent information. Where, then, shall we find the truth?" (James H Jeans, "Physics and Philosophy" 3rd Ed., 1943)
"When two hypotheses are possible, we provisionally choose that which our minds adjudge to the simpler on the supposition that this Is the more likely to lead in the direction of the truth." (James H Jeans, "Physics and Philosophy" 3rd Ed., 1943)
"There’s an affinity between men and the machines they make. They make them out of their own brains, really, a sort of mental conception and gestation, and the result responds to the mind that created them, and to all human minds that understand and manipulate them." (Catherine L Moore, "NoWoman Born", 1944)
"While the stuff from which our world picture is build is yielded exclusively from the sense organs as organs of the mind, so that every man's world picture is and always remains a construct of his mind and cannot be proved to have any other existence […]" (Erwin Schrodinger, "What is Life?", 1944)
"Even Truth is of many types, like – Imaginative Truth, Practical Truth and Philosophical Truth. That which is in three times, that is called Truth and God itself is the first and the last truth. But in practical life, truth takes many forms and as the practical truth I understand the sensible world's hard comprehensible truth. The one attained by the research of intellect, I call philosophical truth and imaginative that which illustrates through the subtle pictures of the mind." (Laxmi Prasad Devkota, "Art and Life", 1945)
"Figures and symbols are closely connected with mathematical thinking, their use assists the mind. […] At any rate, the use of mathematical symbols is similar to the use of words. Mathematical notation appears as a sort of language, une langue bien faite, a language well adapted to its purpose, concise and precise, with rules which, unlike the rules of ordinary grammar, suffer no exception."
"The straight line of the geometers does not exist in the material universe. It is a pure abstraction, an invention of the imagination or, if one prefers, an idea of the Eternal Mind." (Eric T Bell, "The Magic of Numbers", 1946)
"To a scientist a theory is something to be tested. He seeks not to defend his beliefs, but to improve them. He is, above everything else, an expert at ‘changing his mind’." (Wendell Johnson, 1946)
"A useful concept may be a barrier to the acceptance of a better one if long-entrenched in the minds of scientists." (James B Conant, "On Understanding Science", 1947)
"Science condemns itself to failure when, yielding to the infatuation of the serious, it aspires to attain being, to contain it, and to possess it; but it finds its truth if it considers itself as a free engagement of thought in the given, aiming, at each discovery, not at fusion with the thing, but at the possibility of new discoveries; what the mind then projects is the concrete accomplishment of its freedom." (Simone de Beauvoir, "The Ethics of Ambiguity", 1947)
"The study of mathematics cultivates the reason; that of the languages, at the same time, the reason and the taste. The former gives the grasp and power to the mind; the latter both power and flexibility. The former by itself, would prepare us for a state of certainties, which nowhere exists; the later, for a state of probabilities which is that of common life. Each, by itself, does but an imperfect work: in the union of both, is the best discipline for the mind, and the best mental training for the world as it is." (Tyron Edwards, "The New Dictionary of Thoughts", 1948)
"I believe, that the decisive idea which brings the solution of a problem is rather often connected with a well-turned word or sentence. The word or the sentence enlightens the situation, gives things, as you say, a physiognomy. It can precede by little the decisive idea or follow on it immediately; perhaps, it arises at the same time as the decisive idea. […] The right word, the subtly appropriate word, helps us to recall the mathematical idea, perhaps less completely and less objectively than a diagram or a mathematical notation, but in an analogous way. […] It may contribute to fix it in the mind." (George Polya [in a letter to Jaque Hadamard, "The Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field", 1949])
"The crucial problem is that of describing what is ‘seen in the mind’s eye’ and what is ‘heard in one’s head’. What are spoken of as ‘visual images’, ‘mental pictures’, ‘auditory images’ and, in one use, ‘ideas’ are commonly taken to be entities which are genuinely found existing and found existing elsewhere than in the external world. So minds are nominated for their theatres." (Gilbert Ryle, "The Concept of Mind", 1949)
"To see is one thing; to picture or visualise is another. A person can see things, only when his eyes are open, and when his surroundings are illuminated; but he can have pictures in his mind’s eye, when his eyes are shut and when the world is dark." (Gilbert Ryle, "The Concept of Mind", 1949)
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