"[…] 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)
"Exhaustive studies by many investigators have shown that the fundamental laws of nature do not control the phenomena directly. We must picture them as operating in a substratum of which we can form no mental picture unless we are willing to introduce a number of irrelevant and therefore unjustifiable suppositions." (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)
"Statistics is the branch of scientific method which deals with the data obtained by counting or measuring the properties of populations of natural phenomena. In this definition 'natural phenomena' includes all the happenings of the external world, whether human or not " (Sir Maurice G Kendall, "Advanced Theory of Statistics", Vol. 1, 1943)
"This, however, is very speculative; the point of interest for our present enquiry is that physical reality is built up, apparently, from a few fundamental types of units whose properties determine many of the properties of the most complicated phenomena, and this seems to afford a sufficient explanation of the emergence of analogies between mechanisms and similarities of relation-structure among these combinations without the necessity of any theory of objective universals." (Kenneth Craik, "The Nature of Explanation", 1943)
"A model, like a novel, may resonate with nature, but it is not a ‘real’ thing. Like a novel, a model may be convincing - it may ‘ring true’ if it is consistent with our experience of the natural world. But just as we may wonder how much the characters in a novel are drawn from real life and how much is artifice, we might ask the same of a model: How much is based on observation and measurement of accessible phenomena, how much is convenience? Fundamentally, the reason for modeling is a lack of full access, either in time or space, to the phenomena of interest." (Kenneth Belitz, Science, Vol. 263, 1944)
"Since science’s competence extends to observable and measurable phenomena, not to the inner being of things, and to the means, not to the ends of human life, it would be nonsense to expect that the progress of science will provide men with a new type of metaphysics, ethics, or religion." (Jacques Maritain, "Science and Ontology", Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Vol. 5, 1944)
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