"Nature shows that with the growth of intelligence comes increased capacity for pain, and it is only with the highest degree of intelligence that suffering reaches its supreme point." (Arthur Schopenhauer, "The Wisdom of Life", 1851)
"As long as men inquire, they will find opportunities to know more upon these topics than those who have gone before them, so inexhaustibly rich is nature in the innermost diversity of her treasures of beauty, order, and intelligence." (J Louis R Agassiz, "Essay on Classification", 1859)
"Modern civilisation rests upon physical science; take away her gifts to our own country, and our position among the leading nations of the world is gone tomorrow; for it is physical science only that makes intelligence and moral energy stronger than brute force." (Julian Huxley, "A Lobster; or, The Study of Zoology", 1861)
"Are our systems the inventions of naturalists, or only their reading of the Book of Nature? and can that book have more than one reading? If these classifications are not mere inventions, if they are not an attempt to classify for our own convenience the objects we study, then they are thoughts which, whether we detect them or not, are expressed in Nature, - then Nature is the work of thought, the production of intelligence carried out according to plan, therefore premeditated, - and in our study of natural objects we are approaching the thoughts of the Creator, reading His conceptions, interpreting a system that is His and not ours." (Jean L R Agassiz, "Methods of Study in Natural History", 1863)
"May not Music be described as the Mathematic of sense, Mathematic as the Music of the reason? the soul of each the same! Thus the musician feels Mathematic, the mathematician thinks Music - Music the dream, Mathematic the working life - each to receive its consummation from the other when the human intelligence, elevated to its perfect type […]" (James J Sylvester, "On Newton’s Rule for the Discovery of Imaginary Roots", 1865)
"It is through a conviction of the inadequacy of all formulas to cover the facts of nature, it is by a constant recollection of the fallibility of the best instructed intelligence, and by an unintermittent skepticism which goes out of its way to look for difficulties, that scientific progress has been made possible." (James A Froude, "Short Studies on Great Subjects" Vol. 2, 1867)
"Mathematics is that form of intelligence in which we bring the objects of the phenomenal world under the control of the conception of quantity. (George H Howison, "The Departments of Mathematics, and Their Mutual Relations", Journal of Speculative Philosophy Vol. 5, 1871)
"The accidental causes of science are only 'accidents' relatively to the intelligence of a man." (Chauncey Wright, "The Genesis of Species", North American Review, 1871)
"The object of pure Physic is the unfolding of the laws of the intelligible world; the object of pure Mathematic that of the unfolding the laws of human intelligence." (James J Sylvester, "On a Theorem Connected with Newton’s Rule", cca. 1870-1883)
"[…] the process of evolution on this earth, so far as we can judge, has been carried out neither with intelligence nor truth, but entirely through the routine of various sequences, commonly called 'laws', established or necessitated we know not how." (Sir Francis Galton, "Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development", 1883)
"It is a common and necessary feature of human intelligence that we can neither conceive of things nor define them conceptually without adding attributes to them that simply do not exist. This applies not only to every thought and imagination of ordinary life, even the sciences do not proceed otherwise. Only philosophy seeks and finds the difference between things that exist and things that we perceive, and also sees the necessity of this difference. […] What we add are therefore not incorrect conceptions but the conditions for such conceptions in general. We cannot simply remove them and replace them with better ones; either we must add them, or we must abstain from all conceptions of this kind." (Heinrich Hertz, "Die Prinzipien der Mechanik in neuem Zusammenhange dargestellt", 1894)
"It is a law of nature we overlook, that intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger, and trouble. An animal perfectly in harmony with its environment is a perfect mechanism. Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no change and no need of change. Only those animals partake of intelligence that have a huge variety of needs and dangers." (Herbert G Wells, "The Time Machine", 1895)
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