Philosophy

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To the gross senses the chair seems solid and substantial. But the gross senses and be refined by means of instruments. Closer observations are made, as the result of which we are forced to conclude that the chair is "really" a swarm of electric charges whizzing about in empty space. While the substantial chair is an abstraction easily made from the from the memories of innumerable sensations of sight and touch, the electric charge chair is a difficult and far-fetched abstraction from certain visual sensations so excessively rare (they can only come to us in the course of elaborate experiments) that not one man in a million has ever been in the position to make it for himself. The overwhelming majority of us accept the electric-charge chair on authority, as good Catholics accept transubstantiation.

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A circle is a round straight line with a hole in the middle.

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The rational and the irrational are naturally different for different persons as are good and evil and profitable and unprofitable. For this reason we need to learn how to adjust our conceptions of rational and irrational and keep them in harmony with nature. When we determine the rational and the irrational we use both our estimates of external things and the criterion of our own character. This makes it most important that we understand ourselves. You must know how highly you value yourself and at what price you will sell yourself; different men sell themselves at different prices.

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First Shakespeare sonnets seem meaningless; first Bach fugues, a bore; first differential equations, sheer torture. But training changes the nature of our spiritual experiences. In due course, contact with an obscurely beautiful poem, an elaborate piece of counterpoint or of mathematical reasoning, causes us to feel direct intuitions of beauty and significance. It is the same in the moral world.

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Philosophy is like trying to open a safe with a combination lock: each little adjustment of the dials seems to achieve nothing, only when everything is in place does the door open.

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Doubt because doubt is not a sin, it is a sign of your intelligence. You are not responsible to any nation, to any church, to any God. You are responsible only for one thing, and that is self knowledge. And the miracle is, if you can fulfill this responsibility, you will be able to fulfill many other responsibilities without any effort. The moment you come to your own being, a revolution happens in your vision. Your whole outlook about life goes through a radical change. You start feeling new responsibilities--not as some thing to be done, not as a duty to be fulfilled, but as a joy to do.

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My design in this book is not to explain the properties of light by hypotheses, but to propose and prove them by reason and experiments: In order to which, I shall premise the following definitions and axioms.

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That can not possibly be, because it could never possibly be.

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Are not all hypotheses erroneous, in which light is supposed to consist in pression or motion, propagated through a fluid medium? For in all these hypotheses the phaenomena of light have been hitherto explain' d by supposing that they arise from new Modifications of the rays; which is an erroneous supposition.

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A tautology's truth is certain, a proposition's possible, a contradiction's impossible. (Certain, possible, impossible: here we have the first indication of the scale that we need in the theory of probability.