On Nature (1910-1919)

"The scientific worker has elected primarily to know, not do. He does not directly seek, like the practical man, to realize the ideal of exploiting nature and controlling life – though he makes this more possible; he seeks rather to idealize – to conceptualize – the real, or at least those aspects of reality that are available in his experience. He thinks more of lucidity and formulae than of loaves and fishes. He is more concerned with knowing Nature than with enjoying her. His main intention is to describe the sequences in Nature in the simplest possible formulae, to make a working thought-model of the known world. He would make the world translucent, not that emotion may catch the glimmer of the indefinable light that shines through, but for other reasons – because of his inborn inquisitiveness, because of his dislike of obscurities, because of his craving for a system – an intellectual system in which phenomena are at least provisionally unified." (Sir John A Thomson," Introduction to Science", 1911)

"It is experience which has given us our first real knowledge of Nature and her laws. It is experience, in the shape of observation and experiment, which has given us the raw material out of which hypothesis and inference have slowly elaborated that richer conception of the material world which constitutes perhaps the chief, and certainly the most characteristic, glory of the modern mind." (Arthur J Balfour, "The Foundations of Belief", 1912)

"[…] mathematical verities flow from a small number of self-evident propositions by a chain of impeccable reasonings; they impose themselves not only on us, but on nature itself. They fetter, so to speak, the Creator and only permit him to choose between some relatively few solutions. A few experiments then will suffice to let us know what choice he has made. From each experiment a number of consequences will follow by a series of mathematical deductions, and in this way each of them will reveal to us a corner of the universe. This, to the minds of most people, and to students who are getting their first ideas of physics, is the origin of certainty in science." (Henri Poincaré, "The Foundations of Science", 1913)

"It is well to notice in this connection [the mutual relations between the results of counting and measuring] that a natural law, in the statement of which measurable magnitudes occur, can only be understood to hold in nature with a certain degree of approximation; indeed natural laws as a rule are not proof against sufficient refinement of the measuring tools." (Luitzen E J Brouwer, "Intuitionism and Formalism", Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, Vol. 20, 1913)

"Tektology must discover what modes of organization are observed in nature and human activities; then generalize and systemize these modes; further it should explain them, that is, elaborate abstract schemes of their tendencies and regularities; finally, based on these schemes it must determine the directions of organizational modes development and elucidate their role in the economy of world processes. This general plan is similar to the plan of any other science but the object studied differs essentially. Tektology deals with the organizational experience not of some particular branch but with that of all of them in the aggregate; to put it in other words, tektology embraces the material of all the other sciences, as well as of all the vital practices from which those sciences arose, but considers this material only in respect of methods, i.e. everywhere it takes an interest in the mode of the organization of this material."  (Alexander Bogdanov, "Tektology: The Universal Organizational Science" Vol. I, 1913)

"It is an enduring truth, which can never be altered, that every infraction of the Law of nature must carry its punitive consequences with it. We can never get beyond that range of cause and effect." (Thomas Troward, "The Edinburgh Lectures on Mental Science", 1915)

"A truthful mind is necessary for the discovery of truth in Nature." (Sir Richard A Gregory, "Discovery; or, The Spirit and Service of Science", 1916)

"It may be impossible for human intelligence to comprehend absolute truth, but it is possible to observe Nature with an unbiased mind and to bear truthful testimony of things seen." (Sir Richard A Gregory, "Discovery, Or, The Spirit and Service of Science", 1916)

"Like children who are not permitted to do certain things, we are not permitted by nature to think in terms of infinity." (Robert Tuttle Morris, "Microbes and Men", 1916)

"The reason the obvious in Nature goes unrecognized so long is because artful man misdoubts her plain message and in a spirit of subtlety reads in a farrago of irrelevancies between the lines."  (George H Lepper, "From Nebula to Nebula", 1917)

"But it is just this characteristic of simplicity in the laws of nature hitherto discovered which it would be fallacious to generalize, for it is obvious that simplicity has been a part cause of their discovery, and can, therefore, give no ground for the supposition that other undiscovered laws are equally simple." (Bertrand Russell, "'On the Scientific Method in Philosophy", 1918)

"The progressive development of man is vitally dependent on invention. It is the most important product of his creative brain. Its ultimate purpose is the complete mastery of mind over the material world, the harnessing of the forces of nature to human needs. This is the difficult task of the inventor who is often misunderstood and unrewarded. But he finds ample compensation in the pleasing exercises of his powers and in the knowledge of being one of that exceptionally privileged class without whom the race would have long ago perished in the bitter struggle against pitiless elements. Speaking for myself, I have already had more than my full measure of this exquisite enjoyment; so much, that for many years my life was little short of continuous rapture." (Nikola Tesla, "My Inventions", 1919)