"In her manifold opportunities Nature has thus helped man to polish the mirror of [man’s] mind, and the process continues. Nature still supplies us with abundance of brain-stretching theoretical puzzles and we eagerly tackle them; there are more worlds to conquer and we do not let the sword sleep in our hand; but how does it stand with feeling? Nature is beautiful, gladdening, awesome, mysterious, wonderful, as ever, but do we feel it as our forefathers did?" (Sir John A Thomson, "The System of Animate Nature", 1920)
"Our model of Nature […] should be like an engine with movable parts. We need not fix the position of any one lever; that is to be adjusted from time to time as the latest observations indicate. The aim of the theorist is to know the train of wheels which the lever sets in motion - that binding of the parts which is the soul of the engine." (Sir Arthur S Eddington, The Internal Constitution of Stars, Nature Vol. 106 (2603), 1920)
"The notion that Nature does not proceed by jumps is only one of the budget of plausible lies that we call classical education. Nature always proceeds by jumps. She may spend twenty thousand years making up her mind to jump; but when she makes it up at last, the jump is big enough to take us into a new age." (George B Shaw, "The Gospel of the Brothers Barnabas: Present Day", cca 1920)
"Mere deductive logic, whether you clothe it in mathematical symbols and phraseology or whether you enlarge its scope into a more general symbolic technique, can never take the place of clear relevant initial concepts of the meaning of your symbols, and among symbols I include words. If you are dealing with nature, your meanings must directly relate to the immediate facts of observation. We have to analyse first the most general characteristics of things observed, and then the more casual contingent occurrences. There can be no true physical science which looks first to mathematics for the provision of a conceptual model. Such a procedure is to repeat the errors of the logicians of the middle-ages." (Alfred N Whitehead, "Principle of Relativity", 1922)
"Tektology must clarify the modes of organization that are perceived to exist in nature and human activity; then it must generalize and systematize these modes; further it must explain them, that is, propose abstract schemes of their tendencies and laws; finally, based on these schemes, determine the direction of organizational methods and their role in the universal process. This general plan is similar to the plan of any natural science; but the objective of tektology is basically different. Tektology deals with organizational experiences not of this or that specialized field, but of all these fields together. In other words, tektology embraces the subject matter of all the other sciences and of all the human experience giving rise to these sciences, but only from the aspect of method, that is, it is interested only in the modes of organization of this subject matter." (Alexander Bogdanov, "Tektologia: Vseobshchaya Organizatsionnaya Nauka" ["Tektology: The Universal Organizational Science"], 1922)
"In the grandeur of its sweep in space and time, and the beauty and simplicity of the relations which it discloses between the greatest and the smallest things of which we know, it reveals as perhaps nothing else does, the majesty of the order about us which we call nature, and, as I believe, of that Power behind the order, of which it is but a passing shadow." (Henry N Russell, "Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution", 1923)
"[…] evolution is only one aspect of the order of nature, of the relations of cause and effect, of continuity of space and time, which pervade the universe and enable us to comprehend its simplicity of plan, its complexity of detail." (William D Matthew, Natural History Vol. 25 (2), 1925))
"Nature is probably quite indifferent to the aesthetic preferences of mathematicians." (Alfred N Whitehead, "Science and the Modern World", 1925)
"The discovery that all mathematics follows inevitably from a small collection of fundamental laws is one which immeasurably enhances the intellectual beauty of the whole; to those who have been oppressed by the fragmentary and incomplete nature of most existing chains of deduction this discovery comes with all the overwhelming force of a revelation; like a palace emerging from the autumn mist as the traveler ascends an Italian hill-side, the stately stories of the mathematical edifice appear in their due order and proportion, with a new perfection in every part." (Bertrand A W Russell, "Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays", 1925)
"(Holism is) the tendency in nature to form wholes that are greater than the sum of the parts through creative evolution [...]" (Jan Smuts, "Holism and Evolution", 1926)
"An accurate observation remains unaltered throughout the ages. Its scientific value is determined by its truth to Nature; and the more complete the testimony, the less room is there for elaboration by investigators in succeeding generations." (Sir Richard A Gregory, "Discovery; or, The Spirit and Service of Science", 1928)
"For establishing the laws of nature one resorts (not deliberately but involuntarily) to the simplest formulas that seem to describe the phenomena with reasonable accuracy. […] Even those laws of nature that are the most general and important for the world view have always been proved experimentally only in a confined ambit and with limited accuracy. […] The exact formulation of the laws of nature by simple formulas is based on the desire to master external phenomena with the simplest tools possible." (Felix Klein, "Elementary Mathematics from a Higher Standpoint" Vol III: "Precision Mathematics and Approximation Mathematics", 1928)
"It is unreasonable to expect science to produce a system of ethics - ethics are a kind of highway code for traffic among mankind - and the fact that in physics atoms which were yesterday assumed to be square are now assumed to be round is exploited with unjustified tendentiousness by all who are hungry for faith; so long as physics extends our dominion over nature, these changes ought to be a matter of complete indifference to you." (Sigmund Freud, [Letter to Oskar Pfister] 1928)
"The weak point in all such reflections is that they depend on an arbitrary preference of certain ideas and concepts of precision mathematics, while observations in nature always have only limited precision and can be related in very different manners to topics of precision mathematics. It is more generally questionable whether we should be looking for the essence of a correct explanation of nature on the basis of precision mathematics, and whether we could ever go beyond a skillful use of approximation mathematics." (Felix Klein, "Elementary Mathematics from a Higher Standpoint" Vol III: "Precision Mathematics and Approximation Mathematics", 1928)
"To those who study her, Nature reveals herself as extraordinarily fertile and ingenious in devising means, but she has no ends which the human mind has been able to discover or comprehend." (Joseph W Krutch, "The Modern Temper", 1929)
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